I am the epitome of the “alternative student”; at the age of 40, I’ll graduate with a Bachelors’ Degree in Information Technology, and will mark my 14th year of intensive involvement with the various aspects of the Technological Information field.
With so much experience, my friends often ask me why I bothered with a degree, when I’d already been working in the field and making money.
The easiest reason to cough up is that throughout my working career, I’d been passed up many times for high-paying positions, simply because of my lack of degree. So now, theoretically, assuming that a full time job is what I’m after, I can at least qualify, if not command, any number of positions that range far higher than those I’d previously been able to be considered for, depending on responsibilities and locations.
But money is not the ultimate reason why I went to college, even though, the Lord knows, I really do need it! I already knew how to fix computers, and it’s true, I know how to do so even better, now, but computers themselves are not the actual technology, you see. The software that runs on them is a product of technology, but not really a technology unto itself.
The real value of a thing is the concepts and ideas which led to the creation of the thing itself… My good friend Dr. Li gives a good description of this.
First, he gives us a bit of clarification:
“To clarify, IT is a field of study, whileinformation technology is just a procedure that processes data. ComputerScience is a field of study, while the act of coding is a sequence of
Dr.Li then goes on to remind us that IT in a corporation is not just computer support when things go wrong; IT adds value, not only to the employees of the corporation, but also to its customers, by providing new services and reduced operating costs, which can result in great savings.
Just take a look at this definition of IT, though — He really hits it on the head!
Definitions: (5/12/2006 – whatcanbe)
InformationTechnology (IT) is the discipline that systematically studies methodsand processes that increase the value of data and structured data byprocessing, generating, and/or delivering the result to the right
person in the right place at the right time.
If you read this carefully, you’ll see that there is no reference to computers at all. In fact, information technology pre-dates computers, and in one form or another has been used for most of the 20th century.Â
Probably the simplest example possible is a toaster — yes, even a toaster uses a little information technology. I mean, just imagine a toaster that didn’t let you know it was done toasting! Even the simplest toaster makes a distinct noise when it pops up, and you can see the toast sticking out of the top — it has sent you, the operator, a clear stream of information that you can easily understand: “The toast is ready”.
But toasters did not always work this way — I’ve seen antique versions, where you had to manually flip the toast. Granted, it was still an improvement over yet earlier attempts, but somebody had to sit back and conceive of a better way. The idea that arose from this, and the research, development, and testing, is the essence of IT.
Granted, I don’t know the actual story of the development of the toaster, I was just using that as an example. A more purified example, however, is ISO 900X. ISO stands for the International Standards Organization, and the different levels of specifications that they provide can be applied to different business specialties. When businesses enroll, and then document their compliance with these specifications, they can display the ISO logo on all of their paperwork, and qualify for a greater number of contracts with governments and businesses worldwide.
actions that produces software applications.
I used to rather like this post, but it seems that the act of importing it has chopped it up pretty bad. I’ll have to go in and edit it some more, later, to get it back to where it should be!