By Philip Yiga | May 4, 2018

Although it offers various positive effects for global businesses in-terms of easy communication, E-commerce and information-management, technology also negative impacts on businesses and even in fact some businesses today a falling because of technology. So, in this post I’m going to provide you with some of the biggest disadvantages of technology in businesses today.

 

Negative Impacts of Technology on Business:

• High Technology Implementation Costs: implementing advanced technologies in a business is a bit expensive because it involves initial purchasing costs, maintenance costs and training-expenses. Additionally, if a technological-system fails, it requires a company to hire service-providers to rectify the problems leading to loss of revenue. Lastly, technological-systems require periodical updates which need continued investment. All in all, any technological integration within a company will require a network-infrastructure and technological tools like computers, telephones and a lot more which are very costly.

 

• Increased security risks: with use of technology in businesses, there has been an increased risk of cyber crime whereby some malicious people are stealing business and consumer information thus costing companies millions of dollars. Additionally, some malicious employees cost organizations money through mobile hardware theft and abuse of Internet privileges. In fact, several businesses operating online have lost a lot of money during online-transaction to hackers and that’s why most online-based companies today are investing a lot of in implementing secure online-systems. However, small-businesses may not afford costly effective online security software which implies that they will have to bare with several online security risks.

 

• Increased Distractions in business: Technology offers various forms of entertainment which act as a distraction to employees leading to a reduction in productivity-levels within a company. For example, things like; online-games, music, videos and chatting-platform tend to consume a lot of employee working-time. In fact, researchers say that it takes up to 8-minutes for a person to return to a creative state after an online-distraction. However, some companies have online-use regulation put in place in-order to prevent employees from wasting their working-time although it very to control all employees.

 

• Increased Boredom at workplace: Technology actually eliminates the use of many employees with a company and it even disconnects the few employees within a company because they tend to use emails, texts and instant-messages for communication instead of person-to-person communication. All in all, technology has disconnected people physically whether at work or home leading to increased loneliness in today’s society.

 

• Employee Training Costs: When businesses implement new-technologies, they will need to provide training to their employees and this tends to be a bit expensive for growing businesses. Additionally, even some old-employees may resist learning the new technologies or experience a low-learning rate which can reduce on the productivity-levels of the company. Additionally, companies that don’t have enough money for employee-trainings may fail to compete with other capable companies on the market.

 

• Increased Competition in businesses: Technology has actually led to an increase in competition to various business sectors and in fact many new-businesses are joining the internet on a daily basis. Additionally, the increased number of businesses online has led to a challenge of retaining customers and an increased risk of being driven-out of business by competitive large-businesses. For example, it’s very hard for small online-stores like Etsy, Wal-Mart and other to compete with Amazon or eBay because these 2 companies have already gained a competitive-advantage over other online-stores.

 

• It Reduces on Confidentiality within businesses: The use of technology through various communication platforms allows employees to misuse company information hence increasing vulnerability of a company secret-information. In fact, releasing sensitive and confidential information about a business can greatly jeopardize the company’s plans. Additionally, some employees may sell information about a new product or service that their company is about to release to a competing company leading total failure of original-company.

 

• It increases customer power over businesses: The use of technology through social-media makes it very difficult for businesses to gain control over customer-issues because customers have more power to express negativity to the public leading to faster spreading of negative-publicity about a given business and it s even very hard to rectify negative comments of customers online since they tend to share them continuously. This can actually negatively impact any business in the long-run and even lead collapse.

 

• Errors and Production Cessation: Technology is business is very good but some employees tend to over rely on business-technologies to complete tasks and this can actually lead to missed errors that may have been rectified if a task was done manually. Additionally, businesses that function completely on technological-tools cant process orders or do anything incase their servers fail or a factories may have to halt production of products if a robotic-system break-down hence affecting the production process.

 

• Conclusion: All in all, technology is offers many advantages over disadvantages in businesses today because it has actually allowed small-businesses and startups to equally compete with large-corporations on the same global or local market leading to increased development on different companies.