By allowing businesses to obtain, analyze and send information more quickly, IT has improved the firm's ability to link activities in different ways. For example, innovations in bar codes, scanners and telecommunications networks benefit both shippers and consumers by reducing instances of lost packages and ensuring accurate and faster delivery. Customers today can even track progress of their goods en-route through the Internet. E-commerce best exemplifies how IT has revolutionized the way businesses communicate with each other and with their customers. Internet-based solutions connect companies with suppliers, customers and improve the exchange of orders, inventory information, accounting and payment information.
Crises can become more transparent in an electronic market and create new competition.
One only has to look at what's happening on Wall Street with the electronic communications networks. Buyers and sellers can become directly linked, literally eliminating the cost of the middle man. Through the wide-spread adoption of these technologies, an electronic infrastructure has evolved based on new connections between businesses, businesses and consumers, and business and government, in which each party relies on the others for open, timely, and accurate information. These connections across industries, indeed across nations, facilitate the growth of economies where businesses increasingly depend on IT to compete in a worldwide market place. In addition to being a tool for productivity improvement, the IT industry is itself continually finding innovative ways to increase capacity and improve their own productivity, and of course, those benefits are passed through to firms as well as to the public and private sectors.