Diversity in the IT Workplace
Write about the Contemporary Challenges Facing the ICT Professionals.
ICT is one of the professional that faces great challenges due to its widespread use in the world today. This is a result of rising use of ICT almost in every aspect of life in handling critical organizations information. It is therefore, essential to understand various concept of ICT components or diversity and some of the challenges facing this professional as a result of cybercrime, handling and virtualization of big data as well as cloud computing. Understanding these concepts from an ICT professional will help in coming up with recommendation or solutions to mitigate these challenges (Aynsley, 2014). The objective of this group research report therefore is to understand diversity in IT workplace concept, how cyber security affects the profession, concept of big data and virtualization and the effect of cloud computing in ICT. The report also looks at some of the conclusions that could be derived from the interview and some of the solutions that will help mitigate the rising contemporary issues affecting the ICT professionals.
According to the interviewee Mr. Benson, diversity in the IT workplace involves including all people from different viewpoints, cultures, gender and backgrounds (CoreHR, 2017). The IT workplace is a business environment that involves all players without discriminating against person’s gender or background. In many organizations the diversity in the IT workplace is affected by the huge gender-gap between men and women. This is a challenge as many IT workplaces in many organizations are dominated mostly by men and very few women (Muravev, 2016). The hiring percentage of women for IT tasks is way less than that of the male counter parts and this has really limited the opportunities to women who are practitioners in the ICT world. According to the interviewee, most organizations have not realized the great potential that women possess in matters technology. This in turn has led to a mind-set that only men can handle technological issues in the ICT working places which is not true (Doshi, 2016). Being a diverse field the success of the ICT would be so great if everyone is included and given an opportunity to put their IT skill to work.
If organizations could embrace diversity in the IT work places by sealing the gender gap that currently exists, the benefits will of this integration will be felt and this will improve the service delivery to their customers (Mangan, 2017). According to (McKinsey 2017), a more diverse organization set up is always able to win top talent and improve its customer orientation, meet its employee satisfaction and aid in decision-making which later leads to increased returns to the organization”. The gender-gap in IT workplace has really discouraged many women from pursuing technology courses since everyone one believes that the IT issues can best be handled with men. The interviewee further gave an example of where he works as a system administrator to elaborate the gender-gap. In his work place, the ICT department consists of about seven employees where six are men and only one lady available. According to him this example paints a larger picture of how the field diversity is threatened by not encourage women to participate in the world of IT in many organizations.
Cybercrime and Its Effects on the ICT Professional
This is the greatest challenge facing the ICT professionals. Cybercrime is therefore a criminal activity that involves the use of computers and networks. Most of these criminal activities are financially motivated. The criminals can attack ICT infrastructure with the aim of gaining profits by extorting money from the affected organizations or interfering with information of great importance to the organization or other parties. Mr. Benson, on being asked on how cybercrime has affected the ICT professional, he stated that the effect of cybercrime in most of the organizations is so severe and in some cases it ends affecting the entire operations of business activities in these organizations (Rouse 2018). According to him, most organizations are not well prepared against cyber criminals and this threatens or affect the business considering that nowadays ICT is the backbone of every business activity. Challenges of cybercrimes arises where the cybercriminal directly attacks and cause harm to computers devices or the organization networks directly as well as spreading malware to the organization’s IT infrastructure. These criminal activities sometimes lead to lose of organizational information, denial of services as recently experienced with Wannacry malware or even a severe damage of the entire ICT structure thus leading to organization losses.
The widespread effect of cybercrime to many organizations is therefore as a result of poorly designed security mechanism to counter the likelihood of these attacks (Interpol 2018). Benson further stated that most organizations do not have clear understanding or knowledge of how various attacks can affect their business operations and only get to know about it once the damage has already been done hence the need to create awareness in order to reduce such vices to the ICT sector. Therefore, organizations should ensure that they put in place proper security mechanisms in order to protect the integrity of their information as well as their entire business operations from the attackers who exploits ICT platforms to gain access to organizations private in formation or even cause harm to business operations that lead to great loses.
Big data has really grown for the past years and is estimated to grow by 800% in the next five years (Flydata, 2018). With such increased in the volume of the big data, the challenge therefore is that most of this data is unstructured, that is it varies in terms of the format. This makes it more complex to integrate these huge data sets into the ICT platform. The huge data set brings about challenges such as difficulty in analysis, sharing, data curation, visualization, and storage and information privacy. Some of the challenges that results from huge data sets include: uncertainty of data Management, big data talent gap, getting data into a big data structure, syncing across data sources, getting useful information out of the big data, volume, skill availability, solution cost. The interviewee pointed out that the rapid growth of the unstructured data, it becomes very easy to reveal confidential or important information using analytic tools which was difficult or impossible to previously determine. This therefore threatens the organization’s information privacy thus affecting data integrity. With large unstructured data, the organizations market and customer’s information could be easily accessed and understood by competitors thus compromising the integrity of the entire organization’s information. The use of traditional analytical methods also leads to delay when processing big data and thus making the information unavailable when needed thus hindering the organization’s business operations.
Challenges Associated with Big Data and Virtualization
To ensure that organizations experience good returns or values, bid data analytics should look for other approaches for capturing, storing and analyzing data. This will ensure that data is generated in real time and made available when needed. Organizations should ensure that they provide quality ICT systems that can handle large amount of information’s in order to avoid delays in processing these huge data sets.
This is an IT technology where organizations pay cloud service providers who provide hosting services for the organizations data applications and servers at a fee (Amazon, 2018). The business organizations with cloud based IT architecture access their data center or applications over the internet via a web interface. But according to Benson, it was clear that most business organizations have not adapt or develop any plans to implement cloud based IT infrastructure. Majority of business organizations opt to have their data and applications kept and managed locally. This leads to increased cost of managing ICT infrastructure as the organizations have to cater for every hardware and software required for the system to work. Another challenge with a locally hosted information as experienced in many organizations is the increased information or infrastructure attack either physically or via the network. This leads to interference of business operations as well as loss of critical information thus making it costly both in terms of management and information loss. At some point the quality of the IT systems put in place for many organizations are poorly designed due to lack of financial potential to put up a quality system.
Therefore with the rapid growth of services, organizations should take advantage of these services and have their IT infrastructures hosted in the cloud at a lower costs as this will provide a more effective platform for performing business operations without having delays resulting from failure of the IT systems. The cloud computing provides great benefits to organizations but the challenge of not having enough knowledge on how it operates has really hindered the use of cloud computing in many organizations. Benson also noted that some of the organizations believe that their information is more secure when it is locally managed than when it is hosted in the cloud. This also becomes a great challenge that the ICT professionals experiences when trying to implement quality IT services and systems.
Conclusion and Recommendations
It is therefore evident that there exist various challenges faced by ICT professionals in business organizations. These challenges include large gender-gaps, cybercrimes, lack of quality tools for analyzing and visualizing big data and finally lack of adapting cloud computing in order to reduce ICT platform management costs (Globalknowledge, 2018). With all these contemporary issues it is therefore recommended that organizations and community should embrace diversity in the IT work place in order to experience great benefits that comes as a result of integration of different ideas and knowledge that could help the organization exploit its potential fully in the world of ICT. Another recommendation is for the organizations to invest in their ICT infrastructure security in order to mitigate cybercrime that can be very costly to the organization. Here the organizations should have security devices such as firewalls that block unauthorized persons from accessing their information, install antivirus programs to protect their systems against malware attacks that could affect their information integrity among others. For the challenge on the handling of big data, it is recommended for the analysts to find other tool that can handle large data as well as have a proper ICT infrastructure that processing large data at a high speed. By so doing it will be easier for the organization to expand and realize their business potential hence improving their services to their customers. Cloud computing is also important to business world, Organizations should adapt cloud computing architecture to save on the costs incurred for the management of their locally available IT systems.
Being a diverse field, it is therefore the duty of every person in the organizations to ensure that these challenges are greatly reduced for the effective execution of the business operations.
References
Amazon (2018). What is Cloud Computing? – Amazon Web Services. [online] Amazon Web Services, Inc. Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
Aynsley, B. (2018). Common understandings of the challenges facing the ICT Profession. 1st ed. International Telecommunication Union, Australia, pp.1-9.
CoreHR (2017). Diversity in the Workplace: Why It’s Important and How It Actually Makes Us Smarter – CoreHR. [online] CoreHR. Available at: https://www.corehr.com/blog/diversity-in-the-workplace [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
Doshi, S. (2016). Contemporary Challenges Facing the ICT Professional. [online] prezi.com. Available at: https://prezi.com/nn_t9-kj9ys1/contemporary-challenges-facing-the-ict-professional [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
FlyData (2018). The 6 Challenges of Big Data Integration | FlyData. [online] FlyData | Real Time MySQL Replication to Amazon Redshift. Available at: https://www.flydata.com/the-6-challenges-of-big-data-integration [Accessed 26 Apr. 2018].
Globalknowledge (2018). 12 Challenges Facing IT Professionals (and some ways to deal with them). [online] Globalknowledge.com. Available at: https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/content/articles/12-challenges-facing-it-professionals [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
Interpol (2018). Cybercrime / Cybercrime / Crime areas / Internet / Home – INTERPOL. [online] Interpol.int. Available at: https://www.interpol.int/Crime-areas/Cybercrime/Cybercrime [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
Makori, E. (2009). [online] Erepository.uonbi.ac.ke. Available at: https://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11295/71082/Contemporary%20issues%20in%20information%20management%20A%20fresh%20look%20for%20information%20professionals.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y [Accessed 29 Apr. 2018].
Mangan, J. (2017). Forbes Welcome. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2017/10/05/diversity-at-work-is-essential-and-its-everyones-responsibility/#15dd91001537 [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
Muravev, A. (2016). Contemporary Challenges Facing the ICT Professional.
Rouse, M. (2018). What is Cybercrime? – Definition from WhatIs.com. [online] SearchSecurity. Available at: https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/cybercrime [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].
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