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The Perceived Impact of Information Technology on Salespeople's Relational Competencies

Sales-related IT tools have been heralded as enhancing salespeople's customer service delivery, professionalism and general sales effectiveness. IT tools in salespeople's customer interactions affects salespeople's perceived relational competencies.

Managing IT for a Flat World

A convergence of technologies and political events in the late 1990s, aided in part by a massive investment in information technology, in effect leveled the playing field and enabled people all over the world to work together. The "flattening" created a global platform that let more people plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than ever before in history.

The Flat Business is focused, fast, and flexible. Scale -- getting larger and larger by dominating more and more components of an industry's value chain, is no longer the end-all and be-all for the corporation. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, companies find it more effective to be the best at certain things for specific, well-defined market segments representing everything from heavy manufacturing to management consulting Companies such as Intel, Dell (DELL), Cisco (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), Microsoft (MSFT), and EMC (EMC) rose to a leading position in their respective industry sub segments, contributing to a more flexible and open IT-buying process and the rapid development of the flat world's global infrastructure.

The Impact of Information Technology on the Competitive Advantage of Logistics Firms

A higher IT focus may improve a firm's competitive advantage. To achieve competitive advantages efficiently, it is essential to integrate IT, align IT strategy and business strategy, obtain IT-related management skills, and achieve IT competency. 3PL managers can expect competitive advantages from their investments in IT to begin showing up when the deployment of IT is higher than the average relative to competitors.

Concluded.

* Contributed by: -
Pankaj Kumar,
Batch of 2006-2008,
National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai.