Page 16 - DMGT548_GLOBAL_HRM

Unit 1: Introduction to Global HRM

1.2.2 Cost Drivers Notes

 Continuing push for economies of scale
 Accelerating technological innovation

 Advances in transportation
 Emergence of newly industrialised countries with productive capability and low labour
costs

 Increasing cost of product development relative to market life
1.2.3 Technology Drivers

Technology has been the other principal driver of globalisation. Advances in information
technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies
have given all sorts of individual economic actors: consumers, investors, businesses; valuable
new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more
informed analyses of economic trends around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration
with far-flung partners.
Multinational corporations develop global information systems for global data processing and
decision-making. The Internet provides a broad area of services to business and individual
users. Because the World Wide Web (WWW) can reach any Internet-connected computer in the
world, the Internet is closely related to global information systems. A global information system
is a data communication network that crosses national boundaries to access and process data in
order to achieve corporate goals and strategic objectives.
Across companies and continents, information standards ensure desirable characteristics of
products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency
and interchangeability at an economical cost. For businesses, widespread adoption of
international standards means that suppliers can develop and offer products and services meeting
specifications that have wide international acceptance in their sectors. According to the
International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), businesses using their International
Standards are competitive in more markets around the world. The ISO develops standards by
organising technical committees of experts from the industrial, technical and business sectors
who have asked for the standards and which subsequently put them to use. These experts may be
joined by representatives of government agencies, testing laboratories, consumer associations,
non-governmental organisations and academic circles.
Both a product of globalisation as well as a catalyst, the Internet connects computer users around
the world. From 2000 to 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 394 million to
1.858 billion. By 2010, 22 percent of the world’s population had access to computers with 1
billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos
viewed daily on YouTube.
An online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its
existence through taking part in membership ritual. Significant socio-technical change may
have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.

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