ICT and Managerial Roles

By Raul Bernardino

Introduction

“Henry Fayol defined managerial role of control as, verifying whether everything occurs in conformity with the plan adopted, the instructions issued, and principles established.”

The controls are a checking point whereas management to measure all actions or activities that are still in line with organization objectives and strategy and it is including measuring the qualities, effectiveness, and efficiencies.  

Far before the organization is going to implement the plan, the organization had to set out it is own objectives and goals to be achieved in certain period of the time. In other hand, to reach the objectives and the goals of the organization, the organization has to have a plan and execute the activities including set the budget line for each individual’s activities and the cost analysis at the end of the executions.

To be easy to control and avoiding different expectations, we, the management has to set out the standards of the operations. For example standard time for of the operation and production, standard of the productivity, standard of the cost, standard of the qualities, and standard of the staff behavioral. With these standards organization will be achieve it objectives’ and goals’.  

Another approach of the managerial role was by “Henry Mintzberg. He took a time for live investigation or researched of five CEO's of a company and he came up with ten managerial roles that best reflected all the daily tasks of manager performs.   These ten tasks or roles are broken up to in groups called interpersonal, informational, and decisional.”  

Category	Role	Activities
Interpersonal	Figurehead Leader Liaison	-         A symbolic duty, performing ceremonies, receive visitor -         To advise and influence, direct and motivate subordinated, train -         To maintain the information links in and beyond the organization
Informational	Monitor Disseminator Spokesperson	-         Seek and received information -         Forward information to other -         Represent the unit to outsider
Decisional	Entrepreneur Disturbance handler Resource allocation Negotiator	-         To initiate new projects -         To take a correction -         To decide who gets what -         To represent the department or unit during a negotiation

With these three categories above, the management can easily implement or execute their roles.

How about the information communication and technology (ICT) function in these three categories above? Are they support and help human being to implement quick decisions?

Following are several the questions that can be tested:

"Can be performed and supported by ICT?": On the role of figurehead, I do think that Information Communication and Technology can play some parts, for instance, create a robot to attend a visitors or guests such as open a door for the guest, ask guest to sign the guest book including write down a purpose of the visit, guide quest to the waiting room, etc. However, naturally, in this situation, we always use human as receptionist to interact with the guests. The Leader role: Herewith, today information revolution, I can say that, the ICT can perform and support the tasks, in which to advice, to train, and to influence. The Liaison role: I do see that Information and Technology can perform and support this and it will be a cost effective. For example, organization website, video streaming, etc. Most of the interpersonal category can be performed and supported by ICT.

The Informational category: All of the roles such spokesperson, Monitor, disseminator roles can be performed and supported by Information and Technology. For example, the internet, intranet, extranet, and websites where are the owners put their visions and missions, goals, objectives, and all activities in. The audience can just extract them from anywhere and at any time they need.

The category of decisional: Nowadays the decision making processes are very much relay on the availability and reliability of the information. In this case, decision support systems are important. We can also doing a negotiation via virtual systems such as via video/audio conferencing, webinar, sametime meeting, etc.  For the resource allocation role, we can see that ICT help and perform including produce lot of applications such as People-soft, Human Resource Management system, ERP, and etc.

“Cannot be executed by computer?”: I do think that, basically computer itself is nothing, unless it is being programmed to do a certain task. The computer will act as human as much as the information has entered in to the system before we request the information from it. In my own opinion that, what are things that computer can’t execute is about the emotion or the feelings. This owns only by human being. In other part, if the computer never being programmed or put information in, somebody requests will be fulfill, and the answer or from the would be “bad command or not recognize the command, syntax error, and etc”.

Conclusion:

Almost all managerial roles are now using the information communication technology as tools to make a quick, efficient, and accurate decision making processes. This means that, human still have a full control on the system. For instance, when a system down, human can still use alternative solution before system back to the normal operation.  

  

References list:

• Huczynski, A & Buchanan, D (2007) Organizational Behavior (6th Ed) Essex: Pearson Education
• Managerial Role [on-line]. Available from: http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Managerial-Role/82391  (Accessed: 2 April, 2011)
• Managerial Role [on-line]. Available from: http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Managerial-Roles/64891 (Accessed:  2 April, 2011)
• Minztberg, H., Ten Management roles [on-line]. Available from: http://www.sayeconomy.com/ten-management-roles-by-henry-mintzberg/ (Accessed:  2 April, 2011)