Information technology'

[merakuk]

What does the the phrase information technology mean ?

[Mobius1]

Information Technology (IT) is a broad term that covers all forms of technology that is used to create, utilise, manipulate, publish, author or otherwise use data in some respect, be it text, sound, business data, still or moving images etc.

It's often synonymous with computers, since they are essentially built for this purpose and it is their sole purpose, but they are not the only devices included under the term.

[TommyC]

For those oldies and wrinklies among us, "Information Technology " was pushed by the computing industry as the 80's buzz-word replacement for what used to be known in the 60's and 70's as simply "data processing" - in other words, just as Mobius says, the whole range of professional business activity that uses computer systems and software to store, analyse, process and report on data for the purposes of it's business - everything from customer databases to accounts reports, sales forecasts to customer billing systems, and everything in between.