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As the technological era has spawned a number of new fads, so it has also spawned a number of business concepts, some of which have succeeded others which have failed. The rise of social media has given brand to a whole new brand of marketing, as well as a brand new way for your reputation to be ruined quickly if you are not careful. The younger generation is the generation who spends the most money usually as they are usually the ones who are getting into their own groove in maturity. Younger people are the ones who typically spend more money, but with the current recession spending has curtailed and businesses must work much harder to prove something is a necessity.

This has lead to many businesses taking to the Internet and technology as a new way of starting to do business. There have been many revolutions from Twitter to Facebook, to Netflix to Red Box which have all enabled certain businesses to thrive and others to fail. The need for up to date technology however can also be countered when you are replacing valuable people with the said technology. Overall, if you replace a person with a piece of technology then you are taking a chance that the technology will be more efficient and might make the rest of the staff work better together. But in certain industries losing that personal touch can make a huge difference.

In certain industries technology is just not preferred over people. The hospitality industry relies on people and has less technological change going on simply because the people who work there are what make that business the way it is. You can’t have robots serving people drinks and food and establish an atmosphere of friendliness. It’s these intangible things that make people better then technology.

Another thing against technology is that it can fail, leading to disastrous events that can really hurt your business. An example of this would be in the winter of 2010 there were many Internet outages in stores in the week leading up to Christmas due to inclement weather conditions. Some stores had become so used to using their POS (Point of Sale) systems that they didn’t even know how to handle debit cards over the phone, and so they lost thousands of dollars, because there was a reliance on technology with no backup planned with people.

Overall an integrated approach utilizing people and technology efficiently is the ideal approach. Asking IT consultants can give you a base idea of what you are going to need software and hardware wise but sometimes you still don’t get your tech needs right. It is also always a good idea to have employees be good enough by themselves to be able to function without technology if they need to.

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Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Technology-Versus-People&id=6682308