International Technology the Continued Proliferation of Technologies

International Technology

The continued proliferation of technologies globally is re-defining the strategies, systems, platform and most of all, the pace of its adoption throughout organizations. The intent of this paper is to discuss how advances in key technologies and systems supporting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and e-commerce diffusion from e-mail through online ordering are disrupting global markets, making them more efficient in the process.

Implications of Technology Innovation on Global Markets

From the initial approaches to managing FDI-based transactions using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) that were manually based and inflexible in the past to distributed transaction systems based on real-time analytics, technology innovation is revolutionizing the accuracy and speed of markets (Stiebale, Reize, 2011). Supporting pervasive data formats, system integration connection points and approaches to unifying systems of record across a business, these technologies are making FDI investment easier to accomplish and also more fluid than ever before. This translates into the cost of capital being reduced across global boundaries and further increases new investment and economic growth in the countries being invested in. The advances in real-time financial analytics are also making it possible for currencies to stay more consistent with each other across a broader set of international indices as well. This stabilizes the global economy while also enabling banks, investors and organizations to invest in the highest potential areas of growth globally. Real-time analytics has become a solid source of innovation in global technologies, supporting transactions and insights from how to better align available investment sources with potential areas of growth (Stiebale, Reize, 2011).

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are often the single greatest expense any company has from a software investment standpoint globally. The advances being made in ERP software are providing more flexibility than ever for companies to tailor these systems to their unique needs, therefore driving up their usability and success rates globally (Huang, Palvia, 2001). The innovations occurring in ERP systems are also making it possible to customize their graphical interfaces to specific languages as well, allowing companies with foreign operations to be up and running in weeks instead of months as was the case before. In addition, ERP systems' key success factors are predicated on aligning process workflows to the specific strategies of companies (Huang, Palvia, 2001). The innovation occurring globally as a result of this process alignment to strategies is leading many companies to revamp their entire approach to implementing ERP, making it more relevant to their strategies going forward.

There is also significant technological innovation occurring throughout the many areas of e-commerce. The use of analytics also dominates in this area of technology use in companies, with e-mail campaigns often having advances metrics used to evaluate their effectiveness. The use of e-mail for marketing alone has grown more significant than any other channel of communication due to the analytics available (Yap, Das, Burbridge, Cort, 2006). E-mail has also become the preferred method for executives in the U.S., UK and throughout westernized nations to communicate in real-time and also deliver files as attachments (Yap, Das, Burbridge, Cort, 2006). Additional areas of innovation in e-commerce include the integration with social media including social networks, and the use of that data to serve customers more effectively than had been possible in the past (Beck, 2011). This aspect of innovaito9n mixes the most potent forces in technology adoption globally with the advent of entirely new approaches to communicating (Yap, Das, Burbridge, Cort, 2006).