Business communication: defining digital firms and technology's role in customer service

¶ … IT revolution is leading the businesses around the world towards a Digital Convergence. The e-technology is changing the traditional business milieu into e-environments with profound applications of the e-technologies in the conduct of the business. The internet culture is getting global. One can observe every where that how the use of e-technologies, from the use of the high-speed internet connections for e-mailing, information gathering and research, video conferencing, use of cellular telephones connected to internet, smart phones, wireless networks, is effecting the business conduct. Hence IT has given birth to an entirely new internet business culture (Jovarauskien?, and Pilinkien?, 2009).

Today, we expect and prefer to purchase goods and services online, connect to our business colleagues online through e-mails or through cell-phones; we reach to our vendors, customers and even employees 24/7 online. Hence the e-technology has introduced a "fully connected" business culture. The adoption and use of information technology has in fact become the largest component of the capital investment in the twenty first century. In the year 2005, U.S. firms invested nearly 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars on IT and telecommunications equipment and software. The use of information technology is so imminent that in many industries the existence and the survival, of firms without extensive use of information systems, is inconceivable. Firms such as eBay, Google, Amazon and the world's largest online university, The University of Phoenix, are simply the babies of the e-world.

Several factors like rapid internet growth and technological convergence, robust transformation of business enterprises, instant growth of the globally connected economies that are knowledge and information-based economies have resulted in the emergence of the "Digital Firm." The next big-thing issue of the "digital convergence" that was predicted by the Top Wall Street investors, economists and leading entrepreneurs a decade ago, has now become an undeniable reality in the form of a "Digital Firm."

A digital firm is simply a firm that is maintained digitally .i.e. where almost all of the organizations communications and significant business relationships are maintained digitally such as relationships with customers, suppliers, employees are maintained through computer networks and e-communication technologies. Not only this, the business processes are also accomplished through digital networks spanning the entire organization (Buyya, Yeo, Venugopal, Broberg, and Brandic, 2009).

One of the examples of the organizations that are quickly transforming themselves into digital firms is the Daimler Chrysler that includes the Chrysler Group and the Mercedes, which has digitalized every step of its vehicle production and sales processes. It has incorporated an integrated Volume Planning System that gathers sales data and sends them back to the production planning systems and from there to suppliers so that they can adjust their productions and deliveries of parts to make exactly the desired amount of models that are actually demanded and selling in the dealer showrooms.

One other example of how the going digital has altered the way firms can reach their customers can be witnessed in the music industry. According to CNN report, Digital Firms are playing a new tune in the music sales. The whole article reveals that how music firms are adopting new e-technologies to provide the best service to their customers (Mollman, 2008).