Information technology

"IT" redirects here. For other uses, see It (disambiguation).

Information technology (IT) is the application of computers and telecommunications equipment to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data, often in the context of a business or other enterprise. The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones. Several industries are associated with information technology, such as computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, internet, telecom equipment, e-commerce and computer services.

Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in about 3000 BC, but the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories such as techniques for processing, the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs

Based on the storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC – 1450 AD), mechanical (1450–1840), electromechanical (1840–1940) and electronic (1940–present). This article focuses on the most recent period (electronic), which began in about 1940.

History of computer technology

Main article: History of computing hardware

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick. The Antikythera mechanism, dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer; it is also the earliest known geared mechanism. It is based on practical reasoning. Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until the 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed.

Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanical Zuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. Colossus, developed during the Second World War to decrypt German messages was the first electronic digital computer. Although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring. The first recognisably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison the first transistorised computer, developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version.

Infrastructure

Information technology infrastructure is the integrated framework upon which digital networks operate. This infrastructure includes data centers, computers, computer networks, Database Management devices, and a regulatory system.

In information technology, and on the Internet, infrastructure is the physical hardware used to interconnect computers and users. Infrastructure includes the transmission media, including telephone lines, cable television lines, and satellites and antennas, and also the routers that transfer data between disparate transmission technologies.

In some usages, infrastructure refers to interconnecting hardware and software and not to computers and other devices that are interconnected. However, to some information technology users, infrastructure is viewed as everything that supports the flow and processing of information.

Infrastructure companies play a significant role in evolving the Internet. They influence where the interconnections are placed, where data is made accessible, and also how much information can be carried, and how quickly.

Data storage

Main article: Data storage device

Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from the Second World War, when a form of delay line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, based on a standard cathode ray tube, but the information stored in it and delay line memory was volatile in that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.

IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years.

Databases

Main article: Database management system

Database management systems emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. One of the earliest such systems was IBM's Information Management System (IMS), which is still widely deployed more than 40 years later. IMS stores data hierarchically, but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows and columns. The first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was available from Oracle in 1980.

All database management systems consist of a number of components that together allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity. A characteristic of all databases is that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema.

The extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation in recent years. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems, it is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort". As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine and human-readable.

Data retrieval

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The terms "data" and

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• Bu "information" are not synonymous. Anything stored is data, but it only becomes information when it is organised and presented meaningfully. Most of the world's digital data is unstructured, and stored in a variety of different physical formats even within a single organization. Data warehouses began to be developed in the 1980s to integrate these disparate stores. They typically contain data extracted from various sources, including external sources such as the Internet, organised in such a way as to facilitate decision support systems (DSS).

Data transmission

Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception. It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.

XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP, describing "data-in-transit rather than ... data-at-rest". One of the challenges of such usage is converting data from relational databases into XML Document Object Model (DOM) structures.

Data manipulation

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 roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers 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 every 12.3 years.

Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analysed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited". To address that issue, the field of data mining – "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data" – emerged in the late 1980s.

Academic perspective

In an academic context, the Association for Computing Machinery defines IT as "undergraduate degree programs that prepare students to meet the computer technology needs of business, government, healthcare, schools, and other kinds of organizations .... IT specialists assume responsibility for selecting hardware and software products appropriate for an organization, integrating those products with organizational needs and infrastructure, and installing, customizing, and maintaining those applications for the organization’s computer users."

Commercial and employment perspective

In a business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems". The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded and replaced.

The business value of information technology lies in the automation of business processes, provision of information for decision making, connecting businesses with their customers, and the provision of productivity tools to increase efficiency.

Worldwide IT spending forecast (billions of U.S. dollars)

Category	2012 spending	2013 spending
Devices	627	666
Data center systems	141	147
Enterprise software	278	296
IT services	881	927
Telecom services	1,661	1,701
Total	3,588	3,737

• 
  Employment distribution of computer systems design and related services, 2011
• 
  Employment in the computer systems and design related services industry, in thousands, 1990-2011
• 
  Occupational growth and wages in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020
• 
  Projected percent change in employment in selected occupations in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020
• 
  Projected average annual percent change in output and employment in selected industries, 2010-2020

Ethical perspective

Main article: Information ethics

The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include:

• Breaches of copyright by those downloading files stored without the permission of the copyright holders
• Employers monitoring their employees' emails and other Internet usage
• Unsolicited emails
• Hackers accessing online databases
• Web sites installing cookies or spyware to monitor a user's online activities

See also

• Information and communications technology (ICT)
• Information systems (IS)
• Computing
• Data processing

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Alavudeen, A.; Venkateshwaran, N. (2010), Computer Integrated Manufacturing, PHI Learning, ISBN 978-81-203-3345-1
• Bynum, Terrell Ward (2008), "Norbert Wiener and the Rise of Information Ethics", in van den Hoven, Jeroen; Weckert, John (eds.), Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-85549-5
• Chaudhuri, P. Pal (2004), Computer Organization and Design, PHI Learning, ISBN 978-81-203-1254-8
• Childress, David Hatcher (2000), Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients, Adventures Unlimited Press, ISBN 978-0-932813-73-2
• Dyché, Jill (2000), Turning Data Into Information With Data Warehousing, Addison Wesley, ISBN 978-0-201-65780-7
• Han, Jiawei; Kamber, Micheline; Pei, Jian (2011), Data Minining: Concepts and Techniques (3rd ed.), Morgan Kaufman, ISBN 978-0-12-381479-1
• Kedar, Seema (2009), Database Management Systems, Technical Publications, ISBN 978-81-8431-584-4
• Khurshudov, Andrei (2001), The Essential Guide to Computer Data Storage: From Floppy to DVD, Prentice Hall, ISBN 978-0-130-92739-2
• Lavington, Simon (1980), Early British Computers, Digital Press, ISBN 978-0-7190-0810-8
• Lavington, Simon (1998), A History of Manchester Computers (2nd ed.), The British Computer Society, ISBN 978-1-902505-01-5
• Lewis, Bryn (2003), "Extraction of XML from Relational Databases", in Chaudhri, Akmal B.; Djeraba, Chabane; Unland, Rainer; Lindner, Wolfgang (eds.), XML-Based Data Management and Multimedia Engineering – EDBT 2002 Workshops, Springer, ISBN 978-3540001300 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |displayeditors= ignored (|display-editors= suggested) (help)
• Pardede, Eric (2009), Open and Novel Issues in XML Database Applications, Information Science Reference, ISBN 978-1-60566-308-1
• Proctor, K. Scott (2011), Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-1-118-10263-3
• Ralston, Anthony; Hemmendinger, David; Reilly, Edwin D., eds. (2000), Encyclopedia of Computer Science (4th ed.), Nature Publishing Group, ISBN 978-1-56159-248-7
• Reynolds, George (2009), Ethics in Information Technology, Cengage Learning, ISBN 978-0-538-74622-9
• van der Aalst, Wil M. P. (2011), Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes, Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-19344-6
• Wang, Shan X.; Taratorin, Aleksandr Markovich (1999), Magnetic Information Storage Technology, Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-12-734570-3
• Ward, Patricia; Dafoulas, George S. (2006), Database Management Systems, Cengage Learning EMEA, ISBN 978-1-84480-452-8
• Weik, Martin (2000), Computer Science and Communications Dictionary, vol. 2, Springer, ISBN 978-0-7923-8425-0
• Wright, Michael T. (2012), "The Front Dial of the Antikythera Mechanism", in Koetsier, Teun; Ceccarelli, Marco (eds.), Explorations in the History of Machines and Mechanisms: Proceedings of HMM2012, Springer, pp. 279–292, ISBN 978-94-007-4131-7

Further reading

• Allen, T., and M. S. Morton, eds. 1994. Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gleick, James (2011).The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Shelly, Gary, Cashman, Thomas, Vermaat, Misty, and Walker, Tim. (1999). Discovering Computers 2000: Concepts for a Connected World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Course Technology.
• Webster, Frank, and Robins, Kevin. (1986). Information Technology – A Luddite Analysis. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

External links

• The Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009