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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE PRODUCTIVITY OF MICRO-BUSINESS IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     Background of the Study

Information technology is an area of managing and employing technology into production activities of an organization in order to achieve high productivity. The role of information technology cannot be out aside because it contributes to economic activities through increase in aggregate productivity which will cause improvement on economic growth and development. IT is the bedrock for organization and national survival and development on a rapidly changing global environment.  Adewoye and Akanbi( 1999) stated that ICT is a complex and heterogeneous set of goods, application and services used to produce, distribute, process and transform information.Technological development have changed the majority of wealth creating work from physical effort based to knowledge effort based and enable micro-businessenterprises to know the value of IT to their firms by offering business opportunities over competitors in the market. For a micro-business to survive in the global competition or market, the firm must improve and acquired IT skills in the production processes so as to achieve high rate and improvement on workers’ productivity. Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production.

Employing IT into production activities will enhanced increase in workers’ and economic productivity, the upward shift of aggregate economic productivity will leads to increase in gross domestic product.Micro-businessplays a crucial role in economic activities and development of a nation. Economic literature shows that IT is important driver of productivity and growth. Pollard claims that micro-business would need high quality IT and must always provide superior value product better than competitor, when it comes to quality, price and service. Using of IT by micro-business enhance expansion and enable small and medium enterprises to compete with multinational enterprises. In a technological environment enterprise (Multinational, and SMEs) make efficiently and effectively utilize economical resources by producing standard technology goods and services, transform human effort and economic resources to produce the market needs.Experiences from practices of Businesses over the world and hypotheses derived from institutional economics and the theory of collective action, as observed by (Manmood and Man, 2008; Oladejo and Yinus,2013), suggest that taking advantage of Information Technology diffusion is possible for business organization and adoption of IT can provide organization with valuable information, improved performance, improve relationships with customers and suppliers, increase efficiency and reduce cost of production among others.

Evidence also shows that full-size business organization has taken the opportunity of IT to gain the edge over their competitors unlike the micro-business.Nigeria government should provide technical environment to support and help multinational enterprises and micro-business to better use of IT and increase the country’s productivity, growth and development through investment in IT.Managers now realize that information technology can be used as an engine to speed up processes, eliminate or reduce paperwork, increase the quality of output and service delivery, decrease storage costs, and enhance information sharing and communication. They also realize that they have to achieve not only management / staff wide computer literacy, i.e. knowing how to locate, analyze, store and use information. All staff in modern organizations needs to be able to search and gather data from different sources, analyze them, select the relevant ones and organize them in such a manner as to allow them make decisions based on the information. These being the case how is Nigerian micro-business Enterprises faring in joining the information technology? What is the micro-business doing to increase their productivity and efficiency through the use of IT? What constraints or challenges are organizations facing in overhauling their management? In what ways exactly is ICT infrastructure enhancing efficiency in the Nigerian micro-business? These and related questions structure and the argument of this study

1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PTOBLEM

Micro-business entrepreneurs in Nigeria engage in business practices for survival as they are local in their nature of operation but they need to forge ahead only through global integration even though the local institutional frame work are not stead fast encouraging the development of micro-business enterprise towards the world economy as those of other countries. Thus, the problem that is identified for this study is how micro-business scale businesses can be developed to meet the challenges presented by globalization in the face of available infrastructure and utility in Nigeria through the use of Information Technology for their productivity.