Thursday, March 25, 2010, by Ernest Cachia
How the Noughties changed IT into ICT
Information technology in the Noughties has been transformed into a solutions-oriented industry.
If there is one thing that has become clear after the incorporation of modern technology into our lifestyle, it is that
the true value of technological advancement is evidenced through the quality of life resulting from it.
In practical terms, gone are the times when people would buy into a concept simply because it pushed the
bounds of technology.
Today, one assesses technology uptake in terms of precise socially acceptable parameters. Issues like
energy/environment awareness, social proximity, service availability, economic value, exposure and
marketability, education and research, health, and so on.
In all areas of modern human activity, technology is taken to be a major enabler rather than driver. This was not
quite the landscape back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
The first uses of the term "IT" (information technology) in its modern sense can be traced back to the 1970s.
Back then, it was mainly used to indicate the electronic management of information, usually in the scope of an
information-intensive environment. Over time, this concept accrued widespread acceptance and appreciation. So
much so, that people started trying to apply IT techniques to other aspects of their business processes - even
those that were not entirely information driven.
Unfortunately, expectations tend to exceed the current capabilities of its provision. It was not long before the IT
demands started to outweigh the IT providers' abilities to satisfy them.
As a direct consequence, programmers had to be equipped with better tools and techniques and a whole new
different mind-set, to be able to cater for the increased IT sophistication demands. The way IT support was
constructed changed from narrowly focused compartmentalised code writing to a broader and more transparent
engineered approach. This provided the impetus for the coining of the field of software engineering, and people
working within this field started to be referred to as developers rather than programmers. This was typical of the
early 1990s, and did not stop there.
The first years of the Noughties saw application demands mutate into solution demands. At this stage, business
processes were becoming more mature and their optimisation required a more holistic and more abstracted view.
A more comprehensive approach to offering IT support to real-world processes was necessary - so the individual
IT application evolved into the IT solution which brought to bear more than one application on the support of all,
or a subset of, the real-world processes involved. The way solutions were engineered forced new and more
indicative professional nomenclatures to come into use.
Hence, the emergence of software/solution architects guiding the overall structure of the solution and application
specialists providing the underlying logic.
This paradigm shift in the way real-world processes are supported through modern computing and IT resources,
recognised that modern IT solutions include more than just software.
The most persistent modern technology in IT is the compact mobile device and the communication dimension it
brings. The pervasiveness of this technology ensured that the fundamental concept of IT changed to reflect the
inseparable nature that IT and communication technology share.
This can be seen as one of the main conceptual pillars leading to the coining of the term "ICT" (information and
communication technology). A modern ICT solution would only be effective if other co-acting technologies are
taken into consideration. For example, when considering a solution for the management of a supermarket's stock
movement, one cannot simple develop a solution for the software working disjointly from the real world. One is
forced to consider such technologies and radio frequency IDs, device 'miniaturisation', building properties,
hardware performance, storage and backup requirements, client needs/expectations, on-line services, and so on.
What used to be called IT is now the multi-faceted and cross-disciplinary area of endeavour generally known as
ICT.
This is an article in a series looking back at how technology changed our lives in the past decade. Dr Cachia is
the dean of the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta.