The information technology industry plays a unique role in helping companies conduct their businesses in the modern era. Industry participants must be highly competitive to provide the latest technological advances. It provides value to customers by embracing new trends, such as cloud computing, virtualization, and mobile application solutions to keep their customers ahead of the competition. It must also be sensitive to changing customer needs and be driven by new business opportunities as they emerge. Although the industry is continually challenged by intense competition, cost pressures, emerging markets, and security threats, industry players provide solutions through innovation, outsourcing, and strategic mergers and acquisitions to enhance their businesses, while improving the way people access and use information throughout their professional and personal lives. This course is designed to help learners understand key concepts, terminology, issues, and challenges associated with the information technology industry, and strategies employed to meet some of those challenges. It will identify the main sectors of the information technology industry and its business drivers, and review the key aspects of the industry business model, its competitive environment and the current trends in the industry. Finally this course outlines some key challenges that this industry is facing and presents common strategies that the industry stakeholders are adopting to overcome its challenges. This course was updated in 2013.

Target Audience

Consulting houses, industry investors, and all size companies that sell products or services to other sectors and industries; organizations looking for knowledge and key business information in the Information Technology industry