Experience IT

Hello Everyone! This is my first attempt at blog, I hope you like it. In this article I have shared some of my personal experiences with IT and also written about the history and need of IT from my point of view.

In India we have to appear for an entrance exam to join engineering. Based on the exam scores you get to choose your engineering college and course. I finished my exams and was waiting for the admission counselling to start. In the mean time I was gathering information about various engineering colleges and different engineering fields (it would help me to choose a college and course). That’s when I came across IT as an option.

I went through the course content of IT and Computer Science engineering; it all looked the same to me. There were similar subjects to study for both the courses. I was a bit confused; if they teach same subjects (except for a few) then why have different branches. Frankly speaking to me Computer Science looked more engineering than IT, may be because of the non-technical subjects that were included in the IT curriculum. Anyway I did not really go too much into details because I was not interested in any of them and chose mechanical.

After the completion of my mechanical engineering I ended up in an IT firm. I was kind of in a problem because I knew the technical stuff but what I did not know was “What the IT industry does?” I did know that we had to build applications, manage databases, etc, but I never really had the big picture. As I gained experience in the industry I realised that what we actually did was, we helped businesses produce, store, manage, process and analyse data. All this was done using computer technology. The system that includes hardwares, softwares, databases and people forms an Information System.

If we try to trace back the history of IT, the information technology seems to precede the invention of the computer. The abacus, used by Asians, Egyptians, Romans, and the Greek can be termed a source of information technology. The first mechanical calculators introduced by Napier and later developed by Wilhelm Schickard, also come under the heading of information technology. Another example would be punch card machines, expanded upon by IBM in the early to mid 1900’s. Even though information technology has a long reach into history, only recently has it been associated with the use of computers.

With time the computing machines developed. More and more sophisticated machines are being built to improve the speed and accuracy of data management and processing. Today, Information Technology departments use computers, servers, databases, specialized software applications and more. The IT department is managed by system and database administrators, an Information Technology Manager and other department heads, including a Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Whether computers are advantageous or not is a never ending debate. But, computers have definitely become a very important part of our life. We use it for almost everything. Reading news in the morning, office work and watching TV in the evening, all are being done using computer these days. Even businesses have realized the potential of using IT and are investing money in IT to gain competitive advantage over the competitors. Whether it actually gives an advantage or not is a different issue.