Information technology (IT) is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination
of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based
combination of computing and telecommunications.[1] The term in its modern sense
first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review, in which
authors Leavitt and Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have
a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Some of
the modern and emerging fields of Information technology are next generation web
technologies, bioinformatics, cloud computing, global information systems, large
scale knowledgebases, etc.
General information
IT is the area of managing technology and spans wide variety of areas that include
but are not limited to things such as processes, computer software, information
systems, computer hardware, programming languages, and data constructs. In short,
anything that renders data, information or perceived knowledge in any visual format
whatsoever, via any multimedia distribution mechanism, is considered part of the
IT domain. IT provides businesses with four sets of core services to help execute
the business strategy: business process automation, providing information, connecting
with customers, and productivity tools.
IT professionals perform a variety of functions (IT Disciplines/Competencies) that
ranges from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information
databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management,
networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well
as management and administration of entire systems. Information technology is starting
to spread further than the conventional personal computer and network technologies,
and more into integrations of other technologies such as the use of cell phones,
televisions, automobiles, and more, which is increasing the demand for such jobs.
In the recent past, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the
Association for Computing Machinery have collaborated to form accreditation and
curriculum standards[3] for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field
of study as compared[4] to Computer Science and Information Systems today. SIGITE
(Special Interest Group for IT Education) is the ACM working group for defining
these standards. The Worldwide IT services revenue totaled $763 billion in 2009.
Technological capacity and growth
Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind
of Moore's law): machines’ application-specific capacity to compute information
per capita has roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986-2007; the per capita
capacity of the world’s general-purpose computers has doubled every 18 months during
the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every
34 months; the world’s storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to
double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled roughly
every 12.3 years.
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