Productivity Paradox In Business

Final Exam Question 1 According to the text, the productivity paradox holds that general productivity in business processes tends to decrease as information technology assets become more pervasive in the enterprise. In other words, the increasing investment in information technology assets results in decreasing levels of individual employee productivity. However, it is also recognized that information technology assets can be incredibly helpful to creating a more efficient business process, thus resulting in larger business revenues. This is the essence of the productivity paradox. A multitude of scientific studies have highlighted the productivity paradox in that some have found that increasing information technology expenditures results …show more content…
In other words, it is my belief an otherwise ethical issue would devolve into the savagery of politics and thus there is no real hope for an effective or well-written piece of legislation to fully address all of the many issues that fall within the scope of computer ethics. Further, even if a piece of legislation were crafted today to resolve all of today’s issues, the law would inevitably become outdated very quickly as technology evolves and new ethical concerns arise. Thus, it would be more practical to relegate the matter of ethics, in my opinion, to a set of best practices developed by the private sector for each respective business sector. Such ethics would be best enforceable through private contractual means (by providing such protections for employees and releases from liability for businesses as the best practices of a particular business sector so dictates in employment contracts). In this manner, ethics in information systems can become a civil matter to be decided by a court on a case by case basis per the letter of the contract and a jurisdiction’s implementation of contract law instead of decided by the …show more content…
In fact, healthcare costs in the US are higher on average than the cost of healthcare in any other developed country in the world. While it is unlikely operations management (which, according to the textbook is defined as “the management of the direct resources that are involved in the production system of a business organization”) would have much of an effect on lowering healthcare costs, there are perhaps some ways operations management (or more specifically, an operations manager) could implement the design, planning, and control decisions for a healthcare provider in order to reduce patient costs. As it pertains to design decisions, the general layout of healthcare services should be in such a state that the more critical and intensive care be billed at a higher rate, while the more routine medical treatments are billed at a lower rate. While this largely is the case for most people, there are instances in which certain aspects of routine medical care (especially for those patients suffering from chronic conditions) are unreasonably costly. Reducing the costs for medical care treating chronic conditions is perhaps one thing an operations manager could do to lower overall healthcare costs. As it pertains to planning decisions, an operations manager for a healthcare provider should contract out only to companies supplying medical device, supplies, and pharmaceuticals at the most competitive rate. Anyone who has had