Defining Information Technology
The exact definition of Information Technology may be hard to pin down for several reasons including:
- Rapid discoveries and advances of relevant technologies continues to stagger us
- We, as individuals, tend to favor a definition that defines well our own role in the field
- Regional and cultural differences in the meaning of the term
In a 2008 publication of the Information Technology Curricula recommendations of the Association of Computing Machinery, the following recent definition was agreed upon by the contributing authors:
"Information Technology (IT) in its broadest sense encompasses all aspects of computing technology. IT, as an academic discipline, is concerned with issues related to advocating for users and meeting their needs within an organizational and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies." Lunt, et. al., 2008, p. 9
IT addresses the practical needs of business
Although the practice of IT has been established for some time, as an academic field IT is new and is founded upon the practical needs of businesses. Businesses need cost-effective, practical solutions to their information and computing infrastructure problems and as new problems and new solutions arise, it is the IT professionals who address the problems, assess the solutions, and are responsible for making it all work.
"IT is a new and rapidly growing field that started as a grassroots response to the practical, everyday needs of business and other organizations. Today, organizations of every kind are dependent on information technology. They need to have appropriate systems in place. These systems must work properly, be secure, and be upgraded, maintained, and replaced as appropriate. Employees throughout an organization require support from IT staff who understand computer systems and their software and are committed to solving whatever computer-related problems they might have. Graduates of Information Technology programs address these needs." Lunt, et. al., 2008, p. 16
IT is the most integrative computing discipline
Furthermore, IT professionals today tend to work at the interfaces between disparate technologies. They don't just implement one system or another; they tie systems together with interfaces, ensure that these connections are secure, problem-free, and compatible with the rest of the computing infrastructure. This means that IT professionals are often the first and the last to address any computing problem, regardless of the source, and regardless of what the eventual solution turns out to be.
"The academic discipline of Information Technology can well be characterized as the most integrative of the computing disciplines. One implication of this characteristic is that a graduate of an IT program should be the first one to take responsibility to resolve a computing need, no matter the source or description of the problem, and no matter the solution that is eventually adopted. The depth of IT lies in its breadth: an IT graduate needs to be broad enough to recognize any computing need and know something about possible solutions. The IT graduate would be the one to select, create or assist to create, apply, integrate, and administer the solution within the application context." Lunt, et. al., 2008, p. 18
In summary, IT is exactly what businesses and other organizations need it to be, and these needs change as new technologies become available. As new discoveries are made and new technologies mature to be useful to businesses, it will be the IT professionals who will need to implement and administer them. To learn more about the other computing disciplines and how they differ from IT, read "What's the difference between IT, IS, CS, SE, and CE?"
