The Benefits of Using ICTs in Business & Finance

Information and communication technologies, also known as ICT, include the Internet, phones, cable services, computers, and other hardware and digital technologies that facilitate the transfer of information from one interface to another. ICT is useful in business and finance because it increases the overall amount of information in the marketplace, which helps people make more informed, rational decisions. In other words, the presence of ICT offers multiple avenues for researching information and checking the quality of information before making decisions.

More Information

1. • ICT offers more information in the marketplace. General search engines like Google and Yahoo! help organize the information collected about business and finance on the Internet, essentially providing people in business and finance with access to a slew of information. Moreover, those search engines in particular, along with NASDAQ.com and a bevy of other sites, are immediately updated with the latest business and financial information, meaning that ICT increases the quantity and quality of information available at any particular moment in time.

   Better Information

   • ICT allows people to connect with each other and multiple third-party sources to verify information before acting on it. For example, email services, text messaging and direct phone calls allow people to reach one another directly and immediately to verify information, resulting in a higher quality of information overall. Moreover, regarding business and financial news in particular, there's constant competition to provide quality information through ICT (e.g., consider how "The Wall Street Journal," Bloomberg.com, "The Economist," "The New York Times," "The Financial Times," and CBS and Fox News are all competing to be the main providers of business and finance information to the public).

   Better Organization

   • ICT also creates a more organized business. Computers and software suites like Microsoft Office especially help to create order in the workplace. Programs like Microsoft Excel organize data, while Microsoft Outlook or even Google help to keep peoples' engagements and schedules manageable.

     Moreover, mobile devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry help people in business organize their time to the last minute (consider how easy ICT makes it to push a meeting back five or 10 minutes). In general, by enabling people to organize their time better, ICT creates a better-organized world for business and finance to operate in. Since time in business and finance frequently translates literally into money, this is a major benefit.