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;JP;ZATNI; ANPAc..r.. General-issue-IT JP/13/ZATNI

What do we mean when we say IT?

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): To put it in perspective, let us start by noting that back in 1937 the railway authority in Bandung -- still under the Dutch administration -- was already using a punch card machine, the precursor of the modern computers.

In the 1940s, our military was already using a first- generation computer to handle its accounting.

In the 1950s, oil companies Stanvac and Pertamina were each using a second-generation computer to handle their oil refinery processes. Within the same period, BNI 1946 began using its own second-generation computer.

These facts were all recorded in a booklet published by Ikatan Profesi Komputer dan Informasi Indonesia (IPKIN, or the Indonesian Computer Society) in August 1995.

Were all these computers already considered part of the information technology, better know as IT, at that time? Most likely they were not. It was very unlikely that people were at all familiar with the term IT in those early days.

These huge machines, which occupied a lot of space, consumed a lot of electrical power, generated a lot of heat and broke down every so often, were just stand-alone computers. They worked in isolation. They existed only inside air-conditioned rooms, interacting only with their operators, who also worked in isolation.

And then, over the years, computers became smaller, demanded less energy, ran cooler but delivered increasing amounts of raw processing power.

In the beginning, these machines were only able to accept data input, process the data, store it and then retrieve it at the operators' commands. Not everyone could have access to the computer. Both the computers and the operators belonged to a separate entity in the organization, which was known as the Electronic Data Processing (EDP), department. At that time, there was no mention of IT, as the computers -- no matter how sophisticated they had become -- were still used to handle data.

Soon, as data continued to be collected, a database management system was needed to capture, store and retrieve it. Computers also became less centralized. People were beginning to access computers from various locations outside the computer rooms using data terminals, cluster controllers, front-end processors, etc. Then new methods were discovered to make one computer talk to another. People in the industry were talking about network topologies -- such as ring and star.

These were the designs by which computers were connected to one another. Then they talked about the access method, the protocol that allowed one computer to inject data into the bus to be delivered to another computer. The network allowed more than one CPU to be connected to one another, and people were then beginning to talk about distributed computing as opposed to centralized.

The technology became even more complex, although each time people glanced at the rearview mirror and said to themselves, "At that point, we thought it would not get more complicated than that."

People talked about local area network (LAN), which connected a number of computers in the same room, floor or the entire building.

They also talked about larger networks, such as Campus-wide Network and Wide Area Network. When the satellite came into the picture, the size of the network became unlimited.

Soon people realized that raw data was not really that useful, as it was not so easy to understand, let alone used in the decision-making process. In the mid-1980s, department managers in purchasing, production, marketing, sales, personnel and others started to demand access to processed data, or information, so that they would be able to make better decisions. Technologists then came with what they called Decision Support System (DSS). Then the bosses also joined in and asked for their own access to information that had been extracted from the data or summarized from the DSS, and they got Executive Support Systems (ESS).

As the use of these technologies in the business world proliferated, they became weapons for winning the competition. It was then when people started to talk about strategic information systems -- systems that let them strengthen their competitive advantages.

It was about the same time people talked about information technology. Computers were no longer regarded as tools for office automation, they became indispensable swords in the increasingly competitive environment.

Meanwhile, the personal computer revolution, which started 20 years ago when IBM introduced its first IBM PC in New York, quickly gained momentum.

The most significant impact of this revolution was that the number of people with good computer knowledge increased exponentially -- in line with the number of people who owned a personal computer.

Computer magazines such as Byte, PC World and PC Magazine helped popularize computers and enabled people with little or even no formal education in computer science to be knowledgeable and skillful users.

End users in companies now had the ability to create their own programs, their own applications and even assembled their own systems. System administrators, whose main responsibility was to ensure that all the computers in the company worked well and the users had no problem using them, got a lot of headaches, particularly because the end users were often smarter than they were. Distributed computing suddenly became a risk rather than an asset.

Then total cost of ownership became a key consideration in IT investment. People realized that the best TCO would be reached if all the applications were run off a server while the users worked on their workstations -- or client computers -- linked to the server. The client-server era began.

At this point, accessing the Internet became a daily routine, and the World Wide Web (WWW, or simply the Web) made retrieving documents on a computer located in another continent a simple task. E-mail became the killer application for the Internet, as it was this facility that drove most of the people to the Net. This was the point when people were already talking about information technology rather than just the computers.

The technological locomotive never stopped. On the contrary, it moved faster and faster. New technologies were implemented in consumer products that were getting smaller in size but stronger in power. Mobile computing now included powerful computer notebooks, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), etc. Computers were beginning to show up in stereo systems, cars and refrigerators.

Technology also marched on in the area of telecommunications. The cellular phone service, which was made possible only by using the computer, dramatically changed the landscape of voice communication. Then the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), enabled us to communicate with our voice over the Internet.

The convergence of computer technology and telecommunications was then completed. The International Telecommunications Union no longer talks only about telephone networks or allocation of radio frequencies, it is now also talking about IT.

Today, the term IT can be used to refer to everything that enables us to digitally acquire, process, store, transmit, receive, store and receive any kind of information-and knowledge- from anywhere at any time. In fact, IT handles any kind of digital materials, including scanned painting, recorded music, digital photos, videos and even books.

It encompasses such a wide array of technologies, services and products -- hardware, software, middleware, applications, network infrastructure, network management tools, backup systems, services, telecommunications, security tools, end-to-end services, end-to-end solutions, data warehousing and data mining, data storage devices, storage area network, systems architecture, consulting services, integration services, satellites, robots, you name it.

And, to top it all, IT has become an integral part of the lives of the people living on the better side of the Digital Divide.

Most businesses, with or without the "e-", are now unlikely to remain viable without IT.

"It is funny if you think about it," said Gary Cox, General Manager of Microsoft Services, Asia Pacific, at a dinner with IT journalists in Jakarta recently.

"When a company decides to invest in IT, they insist that the investment should bring a certain benefit over a certain period of time. Yet, people rarely look back and measure the benefits. Instead, they keep on investing and investing again on IT."

That shows just how important IT has become. IT has been used in computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD, CAE and CAM), it is used in medicine, education surveillance, espionage, criminal even terrorist activities.

It has become the nerve system of businesses in the media, financial, banking, entertainment, automotive, aviation, defense and armament, publishing, media, consumer electronics and other industries.

IT has permeated the human life that it has, actually, become too complex to define. Yet, we always know what we mean when we say IT.