JeremyW. wrote:
The following appeared in a memorandum from the information technology department of a major advertising firm:
“The more efficient a firm’s employees are, the more profitable that firm will be. Improvements in a firm’s information technology hardware and software are a proven way to increase the efficiency of employees who do the majority of their work on computers. Therefore, if our firm invests in the most powerful and advanced information technology available, employee productivity will be maximized. This strategy ensures that every dollar spent on enhanced information technology will help to increase our firm’s profit margins
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My ans:
The argument above talks about that in order to increase the firm’s profit margins, it should invest in the most powerful and advanced information technology, and mentions some reasons; first of all, the author reasons that the improvements of a firm’s information technology hardware and software could maximize the employee productivity who do the majority of their work on computers, in addition, the increase of employee productivity will result in the increase of the firm’s profit margins. At first glance, the author’s argument seem somewhat convincing, however, after a careful analysis, we can identify that the strategy is unreliable to increase the firm’s profit margins, as it suffers several logic flaws.
Most importantly, the evidence cited by the author that the increase the efficiency of the firm’s employees who do the majority of their work on computers may not result from the improvement in its information technology hardware and software. In reality, there are a lot of other factors can help employees to increase their productivity, for example, if a manager decide to increase the salary for workers whose productivity ranked in the first half. Then, we cannot assert that the increase in the efficiency is because the advanced information technology.
At the same time, the author also cannot provide any information or research findings to support his idea that the increase of employee productivity will help the firm achieve its goal to increase its profit margins. Because the profit decided by both the sales and costs, and even we accept that employee productivity will increase as the enhanced information technology, whereas, if the changes of productivity cannot compensate the cost of improvement in the information technology hardware and software, the firm will also suffer somewhat loss.
Last but not least, the author just considers the efficiency of employees who do the majority of their work on computers, and ignore the rest employees. Since in reality, not only the technical employees, but also the other kinds of employees will contribute to the firms, and if the managers only decide to help technical employees improve their productivity, and do not care about the others, I would be really curious about whether this firm’s profit margins will increase.
In a nutshell, because the author fails to provide adequate justifications to support his conclusion that spent on enhanced information technology will help to increase our firm’s profit margins, the argument may not so convincing as it stands. Actually, it is quite crucial to consider the items I have discussed above to strength the argument. Of course, in order to make the argument more authentic, we still need some detail information about the rest characteristics of this firm.
This essay has a good basic structure, however the idiom errors bring the overall grade down. This could be improved by leaving time for proofreading and working on grammatical structure. Also, each body paragraph seems cursory and would benefit from a more in depth analysis. without the grammatical errors this essay would probably score a 4.5 but as written would be more of a 3.5 or 4.