Benefits Of Technology In Business And Academic Management

You have been asked by your college to prepare a report that will describe the benefits of implementing technology to increase productivity and enhance business management. Your report must also include description of how the use of technology could enhance a student’s academic work. 

1. Describe the benefits of using Microsoft office to enhance your studies.

You must include descriptions of at least 3 MS office applications . Select 2 features of each of the MS office application chosen and explain how they could help you enhance your academic work. 

2. Identify 2 technological advancement (2 Software & 2 Hardware) within the industry of the degree programme of your study (Business, HR, Law, Oil and Gas Management, Marketing, Accounting and Finance, Travel and Tourism and Event Management) and:

a. Describe how they can enhance productivity
b. Explain their limitations

3. Conclude your work by summarising the main points discussed in the report.                    

Benefits of Using Microsoft Office for Academic Work

1. In today’s world of technological advancements, businesses are going digital on the rapid basis so as to expand the scope of their business on a global level and to achieve competitive edges in the intensely competitive market. The use of various computer programmes and their functions can help a business achieve heights if the managers have proper skills and knowledge to apply them to their real business case.

Microsoft office has various applications with each having a different and specific purpose. Microsoft solutions and the innovative and intelligent platform offered my MS office enables the hospitality industry to grow exponentially. The three major applications of the MS office software are: MS Word MS Excel and MS Power-point.

• Graphical and table tools:

This tool helps the students to prepare their assignment reports in more attractive and presentable as the use of graphics and tables enhances the communicative values of the content of the student’s assignment files.  Various graphs, charts and tables can be inserted in the files using these graphic tools so as to summarise the data of the long content files. There are different font styles and colours available in the word graphic tools so as to make the work more presentable (M-Files, 2016).

• Spelling and grammar check tool:

This tool enables the students to form correct sentences in their assignment reports which enhance their sentence structuring and grammar skills. The synonym feature in word helps the student to enhance their vocabulary. This tool identifies the incorrectly framed sentences and provides the suggestions to make the required corrections. Also, the incorrect spellings are also identified under this tool so as to avoid minor mistakes.

• Graphs and charts:

This tool helps in creation of charts and tables for the complex data so that it can easily be interpreted by the readers. Also, it helps in analysing the large volume data in a simplified manner though the use of charts and diagrams (M-Files, 2016).

For example if the student is preparing a report on different costs associated with different travelling plans, they can make use of charts and tables to show summary cost statements of all the possible travelling plans.

• Formula tool:

This tool can be used by the student to make various calculations with the use of simple and guided formula functions in the spread-sheets of MS excel. This tool provides various functions such as identification of sums, averages etc. The students can use this tool for various purposes such as to undertake what-if analysis, simulation analysis etc. The ‘what if’ analysis can help the students to figure out different possible outcomes in the different scenarios (Microsoft, 2018)

• Slide presentations:

This tool helps in making attractive presentation on the entire project prepared by the student on the given topic. The different layouts are provided in this tool for the slide preparation and one of the most unique features of this tool is that it provides consistency throughout the slide work as it maintains single font size, colour, layout and style in all the slides. It is better to use graphics and charts to make slides look more professional. This tool of power-point application enables the users to do the same. The title slide layout can be used to place the main topic of the project whereas the title and content slide layout can help the users to incorporate the subject-matter in the slides.

• Animations tools

Identifying Technological Advancements in the Industry of Degree Programs

 Also, there are various animations available in the power-point, the use of which makes the appearance and presentation of slides more attractive.

2. The emerging technological advancements in the areas computers are contributing to the development of various economies in a very positive manner. Tourism and travelling industry is also one of those industries which are being benefited remarkably because of the technological developments in the modern times. Various hardware and software programmes have been developed in last few years that has enabled the operators of hospitability industry operate successfully and smoothly.

In the recent years various mobile applications have been designed and developed to provide ease to the tourism service operators. These applications provide different facilities like online money transfer, currency exchange, booking facilities etc.

How these applications enhance the productivity: All these applications enable the tourism service providers to provide comfortable and convenient trips to their customers across the world. For example: Duolingo app helps the users to learn about different languages so that it can help tour operators and tourists as well to interact with the people on the foreign lands. Also the currency app helps the travelling agents and tourists to know well in advance about the prevailing exchange rates so that they can easily prepare the budget of trip cost (Travel Locomote, 2018).

As all the above discussed mobile applications requires adequate systems and connectivity to access them. However, it is generally found that there are certain areas where there is weak internet connectivity which makes the use of these applications impracticable and ultimately hampers the business functions of tourism operators.

ERP systems like cloud bed helps in facilitating the integrated management of the core business functions.  The ERP software enables the tourism operators to maintain a database of all the departments functioning under a common business unit so that effective flow of information can be made across the business environment. The said software helps in managing the data related to different possible locations, customers, agents and the business parties.

Limitations: As all the data is maintained on the online platform while deploying the ERP software, huge data security is required to be maintained so as to protect the private, confidential business data. The implementation of data securities measures makes the use of ERP systems quite expensive (Zeitels, et. al., 2006).

Apart from development of various software to promote the hospitality business there are various hardware developed in last few years which makes it quite convenient to operate the business easily. They are:

Mobile devices are the most common invention that has provided ease to almost each business industry. In travelling and tourism industry also mobile phones provides great help as they help to support different applications as discussed above, to promote the tourism business.  

As all the electronic gadgets requires some power to remain charged for their usability. It is not practically possible to keep those devices charged for all the times and during their period of inactivity on account of non-chargeability and technical faults, they affect the normal business functioning of the users.

There are various GPS devices that provide a worldwide base-map. The navigation and map applications of these devices help the tour operators to locate different tourism locations to their clients so that it could save their time in finding the right directions to such places.

Limitations:

These devices require proper internet connectivity to be operated smoothly and also these devices have limited battery lives which get exhausted with the continuous use. It is not practically possible to keep them charged for all the time (Petersen, 2018).

3. From the above report it can now be concluded that the use of various technological advancements in the business facilitates it to achieve remarkable growth and success in today’s competitive business environment. MS office is one of the key innovations in the areas of IT technology. The inclusion of use of MS office in the academic courses enables the students to learn about the practical use of various applications of the said function so that it enhances their professional skills. Though it is general fact that the technological advancement help the business achieve heights in different ways but too much reliance on such technological advancement makes the businesses suffer badly whenever there are some technological faults in their operations.

Reference:

M-Files, 2016. Functions in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Available at: https://www.m-files.com/user-guide/latest/eng/Functions_in_Word_and_Excel.html Accessed on: 28.11.2018

Microsoft, 2018. Hospitality & Travel. Available at: https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-in/industries/hospitality-and-travel/ Accessed on: 28.11.2018

Petersen, L., 2018. Technology Used in Hospitality & Tourism. Available at: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/technology-used-hospitality-tourism-31033.html Accessed on: 28.11.2018

Travel Locomote, 2018.  Top 10 Apps Transforming and Travelling Industry. Available at: https://blog.locomote.com/top-10-apps-transforming-the-travel-industry Accessed on: 28.11.2018

Zeitels, S.M., Burns, J.A., Akst, L.M., Hillman, R.E., Broadhurst, M.S. and Anderson, R.R., 2006. Office-based and microlaryngeal applications of a fiber-based thulium laser. Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, 115(12), pp.891-896.