What is Information Technology?
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What is information technology?
Well, that’s an easy question to answer, when you take apart the term. The word information can literally mean any data…or information. Information can be how much traffic flows through a particular street or what people eat at a given restaurant or the information you search for on the Web.
To a computer everything is information (or data). Computers work with 0s and 1s, or a series of on and off states of electric current. So, when you’re processing something with a computer, everything is data (or 0s and 1s).. What the computer does is turn this information into something that is useful to us.
So we program computers to perform tasks that are useful to us, and since computers deal with 0s and 1s, we simply take the outcomes of those processes and apply them in various ways..
So, let’s take a corporation that has a thousand employees… The corporation could use data, or the information that is has on its employees, for a number of reasons:
To determine who should have access to various information
To keep track of salaries and promotions
To assign email addresses
To give permissions to enter into the building
And so on…
You get the picture.
The applications for these concepts are endless. Let’s say you own a self-driving car company and you want to gather information on the most popular places where self-driving cars might be bought. You would want to know everything you could about safety regulations, what makes a person use a self-driving car, how much should you charge for your service, and so on…
The technology you use to gather this information, and the technology your customers use to interact with and order your cars, can all be considered a part of the “technology” portion of Information Technology.
So, you can think of information technology as the tools, systems and processes used to gather, process and implement uses for data.
If you wanted to get a job in IT, you could:
work to build the networks that information and data travel on (i.e., networking can be on a small or large scale),
work as a database manager, or specialist, for any number of organizations,
build the parts that go into a computer,
work as an IT specialist or support specialist in a company,
write code to support software development and deployment within an organization or industry, etc.
You will often see the terms computer science and information technology used interchangeably.
You can find many opportunities in the fields of IT or computer science.
It really depends on who you talk to—you could go to a college or university that lists software development degrees under their IT department and another college might list computer science degrees as a part of their engineering school. So you kind of have to do your research to know what people are talking about when they say information technology vs. computer science. But, what is computer science anyway and how might there be a difference between computer science and information technology?
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