All companies are feeling the effects of changing IT and e-commerce today. Creating and managing a modern IT system is a major challenge for managers at all levels and in all functions of a business organization. Increasingly, gaining competitive advantage and remaining profitable are coming to depend on the possession of a state-of-the-art IT system. This chapter has made the following main points:

1. Information is a set of data, facts, numbers, and words that is organized in such a way that it provides its users with knowledge. The more knowledge managers possess, the better able they are to respond effectively to the competitive business environment in which they operate.
2. Information technology (IT) refers to the many different kinds of computer and communications hardware and software and the skills of the designers, programmers, managers, and technicians who create and manage this technology. IT is used to acquire, define, input, arrange, organize, manipulate, store, and transmit data and information.
3. Four factors determine the usefulness of information: its completeness, quality, relevance, and timeliness. Real-time information is information that is constantly updated. Managers use real-time information to tell how well customers are responding to their products and if a company's profitability is rising or falling as a result.
4. By lowering the costs of information processing, computers make it cost-effective for managers to (1) acquire better data about their operations, and (2) manipulate data to increase their insight about how well a business is operating.
5. The five principal IT applications used in businesses are (a) transaction processing systems, (b) knowledge management systems, (c) expert systems and artificial intelligence, (d) enterprise resource planning systems, and (e) e-commerce systems.
6. The two main kinds of e-commerce are (1) business-to-business (B2B) commerce and (2) business-to-customer (B2C) commerce.
7. The main components of IT hardware are the legacy system, mainframe computers, microprocessors and personal computers; network computers, the Internet, wireless computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs); and wired, wireless, and broadband communication.
8. The main components of IT software are PC software, networking and mainframe software, computer security software, and PDA software.
9. More U.S. job growth in the last decade has occurred in the IT industry than any other. IT has created many new kinds of occupations and transformed other occupations.