PROSPECT AND CHALLENGES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN NIGERIA BANKING SECTOR

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1      Background of the study

Although a lot of research works have been done on the prospects and challenges of information technology in the banking industry, these research works were broad based, while a few were actually carried out on the role of information technology in modern banking operations. Modern banks now realize that only those that overhaul their payment service delivery and operations are likely to service and proper in the 21st century. This is due to the presence of globalization, consolidation, privatization, deregulation and rapidly changing technological environment. In order to properly place themselves in favourable positions for competitions and be one of the corporations to be reckoned with in the new century, banks make use of internet facilities to execute mobile making. This is developed by using personal computers (PCS) to form local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN) through client/server technology (Davenport, 1993).Many banks have installed modern computer interconnectivity backbone that would enable them achieve their communications of data and multimedia over internets, intranets and extranets. They also realize that they have to achieve not only management/staff will computer literacy but what could be called information literary i.e. knowing how to locate,, analyze, store and use information. All staff and managers in a modern bank need to be able to search and gather data from different sources, analyze them, select relevant ones and organize them in such a manner as to allow informed decision making in the organization. Banks of the future realize that the banking and other banking tomorrow requires more of electronic manipulations and shuffling of bits based money and other banking transactions, instead of paper. In other words, paper base of transactions, instead of paper. In other words, paper based transactions, like the internet banking services (Connel and Saleh, 2004). Whether a bank would be successful or not depends on the extent to which it invests on internet and communication technology (ICT) and how she uses it in an innovative manner. This area has been tip to be a major competitive ground for banks that are operating in the post consolidation era. What is the trend in the use of information technology in Nigerian banking industry? To what extent does information technology chance employees and organizations performance?

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Business need to continuously find better and faster ways to adapt to the competitive market place in order to complete in today’s high technology and fast paced environment. According to Hammer and Champy (1993) learning organizations provide a framework that encourages finding better and faster way to adapt in today’s high technology and fast paced world by:

1.   Looking at the whole versus the parts a systematic perspective.

2.   Detecting and correcting errors.

3.   Improving actins through knowledge and developing the broad skills of their work force.

These days’ computers and information processing are in common usage. Computers influence what decisions are made, when decisions are made, what and who is available at the point of decision and who is asked to decide computers and information processing affects how work is organized and how employees fell about work (Stephen, 2012).