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ABSTRACT There has been a controversial debate over how well managers need to acquaint with the area of information technology, especially about what managers need to know of programming and understanding of web source code. Information is an indispensable key to business success and Information Technology (IT) facilitates the ability of business to use information to its advantage. It is the programs (software) that drive technology, the web page presents the business enterprise to everyone. In the heart of every business there also are managers responsible for keeping the records of performance, and using the records to promote efficiency, discipline, and to get the job done. Todays in-depth involvement of technology in the marketplace has created a strong correlation between IT and managers. Over time, the bond between a manager and IT is becoming stronger, signaling the need for more interaction and understanding of both technical capabilities and business goals on the part of managers. This paper posits that managers need to know more about information technology and actively participate in the IT decision-making team. Furthermore, it suggests how managers can have incrementally to acquire some elementary knowledge of programming issues, what shows on the web, what is behind the web (source code), and what is placed on the server (database). In a dynamic market where changes are made in nanoseconds. It is rewarding and may soon become almost mandatory that a multi-talented manager will have to deal with change, to add or supervise addition of pragmatic programming, and web update the web in order to be competitive. Key to the process is the increasing communication and interaction between managers and programmers. The benefit of understanding the elementary steps of programming and web technology is that it will allow a manager to play a larger role in communicating and delegating responsibility with confidence, and competence thus leading to cost reduction and better short- and long-term risk management.

Technology

Programming ARGUMENT In 1982, Robert Benjamin forecasted the state of IT in the year of 1990 stating that all aspects of software will improve steadily, and the demand for software will be so great as to appear infinite (Benjamin,1992). Now, nearly fifteen years later, we are experiencing the fulfillment of these critical IT predictions, and the far more fundamental knowledge and coordination of managers and the programmers they must direct. Why is it crucial for a manager to keep up to date with programming issues and web technology? One may assumes it is not part of a managers job description since programming is associated with complex theories, mathematics, and gibberish code. Furthermore many also assume there are mathematical formulas and theoretical concepts are involved in creating a webpage (front end) or in a web server program (back end)? However the technology and its programming have become less cumbersome than a decade ago, the problems can be easily worked around by some explanation. We do not suggest that managers become programmers who know details of syntax and semantic jargon of each programming language construct. Rather they should become aware of the fundamental changes in programming and be able to identify simple programming concepts such as input/output, decision-making, repetition, and file handling. Managers need to be updated, to identify new simple concept of how to use programming, communicate with programmers employed by their corporations and how to take advantage of web technology. Similarly the programmers and web page specialists need to have a through idea of the purpose production and Modus vivendi of the company. Furthermore, a manager may be able to visualize a concept as to how it is used or should be used. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are roughly 100 million information users in the U.S. More interestingly, Sutcliffeis estimates that by 2005 in the U.S. alone, there would be 55 million end-user developers in addition to 2.75 million professional software developers. From the above estimate, one can conclude that one out of five people in the U.S. population (295 million) has to deal with programming issues and write some sort of program. Sutcliffe and Mehandjiev describe that End-user development is about taking control - not only of personalizing computer applications (end-user computing) and writing programs, but of designing new computer-based applications without ever seeing the underlying program code (Sutcliffe, 2004).

Y2K COMPLIANCE Just a few years ago, everyone can recall that we dealt with another chaos that put many managers under tremendous stress and caused the firing of many. The worldwide problem known as Y2K was both a programming problem and a managerial problem: We could not The International Journal of Applied Management and Technology, Vol 3, Num 2 represent the year 2000 with 00 since 1900 was represented that way. What were we to do? Should we write a new program to change all the data from two digits to four? Should we set a flag for the new data? Yet another problem with Y2K is the year itself, 2000 which was a leap year that was divisible by 400 (not every 4 years is a leap year, e.g. 1900). Y2K made programmers with no managerial training run the show, thus taking over managerial duties. Programmers instructed managers on what to do, often in a compressed period of time, which seemed to challenge the authority and intelligence of managers. Now is not the time to refresh our mind as to whose fault Y2K was, or why managers waited so long to realize that a problem would occur. No one really knows exactly how much time was spent to deal with this crisis, either directly or indirectly. In addition, the Y2K problem and its aftermath was calculated to cost trillions of dollars. We are still paying for it. The trillion plus dollars have been spent by businesses on Y2K compliance, liabilities, and lost productivity due to computer crashes. Managers had to rethink and set survival strategies for the future. What will be the next technology crisis? Should we wait for problems to occur and then tackle them? Why was the Y2K issue not addressed at an earlier stage? Even if Y2K wasnt preventable, involvement of executives and managers with programmers at a far earlier stage would have reduced the overall cost of Y2K. (Braithwaite, 2000).