Information Technology: May 2014

Monday, May 19, 2014

Information Technology: Progress 2

Projected percent change in employment in selected occupations in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020

Projected average annual percent change in output and employment in selected industries, 2010-2020

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProjectedAverageAnnualEmploymentChangeSelectedIndustries.png )

Information Technology: Progress

Employment distribution of computer systems design and related services, 2011

Employment in the computer systems and design related services industry, in thousands, 1990-2011

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EmploymentComputerSystems.png )

Information Technology: ComputerSystemsOccupationalGrowthWages

Occupational growth and wages in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputerSystemsOccupationalGrowthWages.png )

Information Technology: Worldwide IT spending forecast (billions of U.S. dollars)

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Commercial and employment perspective

In a business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems". The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded and replaced.

The business value of information technology lies in the automation of business processes, provision of information for decision making, connecting businesses with their customers, and the provision of productivity tools to increase efficiency.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Academic perspective

In an academic context, the Association for Computing Machinery defines IT as "undergraduate degree programs that prepare students to meet the computer technology needs of business, government, healthcare, schools, and other kinds of organizations .... IT specialists assume responsibility for selecting hardware and software products appropriate for an organization, integrating those products with organizational needs and infrastructure, and installing, customizing, and maintaining those applications for the organization’s computer users."

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Data manipulation

Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years.

Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analysed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited". To address that issue, the field of data mining – "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data" – emerged in the late 1980s.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Data transmission

Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception. It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.

XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP, describing "data-in-transit rather than ... data-at-rest". One of the challenges of such usage is converting data from relational databases into XML Document Object Model (DOM) structures.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Data retrieval

The relational database model introduced a programming-language independent Structured Query Language (SQL), based on relational algebra.

The terms "data" and "information" are not synonymous. Anything stored is data, but it only becomes information when it is organized and presented meaningfully.Most of the world's digital data is unstructured, and stored in a variety of different physical formats even within a single organization. Data warehouses began to be developed in the 1980s to integrate these disparate stores. They typically contain data extracted from various sources, including external sources such as the Internet, organised in such a way as to facilitate decision support systems (DSS).

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: Data Storage

Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete.Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from the Second World War, when a form of delay line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radarsignals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, based on a standard cathode ray tube, but the information stored in it and delay line memory was volatile in that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.

IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years.

Databases

Database management systems emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. One of the earliest such systems was IBM's Information Management System (IMS), which is still widely deployed more than 40 years later. IMS stores data hierarchically, but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows and columns. The first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was available from Oracle in 1980.

All database management systems consist of a number of components that together allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity. A characteristic of all databases is that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema.

The extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation in recent years. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems, it is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort". As an evolution of theStandard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine and human-readable.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Information Technology: History of computer technology

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick. The Antikythera mechanism, dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer, and the earliest known geared mechanism. Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until the 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed.

Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanical Zuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmablecomputer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. Colossus, developed during the Second World War to decrypt German messages was the first electronic digital computer. Although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring. The first recognisably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison the first transistorised computer, developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version.

( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology )

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Infprmation Technology Video

Information Technology P2

Information Technology Certifications: Having a solid education and specific specialty certifications is the best way to progress in an information technology career. Here are some of the more popular information technology certifications:

Jobs in IT: here can be a lot of overlap between many of the job descriptions within information technology departments. In order to clarify the descriptions, skills and career paths of each, I have put together a Jobs in IT listing. The jobs in IT listing includes information on education and training required for each position. It also includes lists of companies that typically have IT jobs open, as well as links to IT-specific resumes, cover letters and IT interview questions.

Information Technology - Trends: Information Technology Departments will be increasingly concerned with data storage and management, and will find that information security will continue to be at the top of the priority list. Cloud computing remains a growing area to watch. The job outlook for those within Information Technology is strong, with data security and server gurus amongst the highest paid techies. Check out the Information Security Certifications and Highest Paying Certifications for more information. In order to stay current in the Information Technology Industry, be sure you subscribe to top technology industry publications.

(Source: http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/careersintechnology/p/ITDefinition.htm)

Information Technology

Defination: We use the term information technology or IT to refer to an entire industry. In actuality, information technology is the use of computers and software to manage information. In some companies, this is referred to as Management Information Services (or MIS) or simply as Information Services (or IS). The information technology department of a large company would be responsible for storing information, protecting information, processing the information, transmitting the information as necessary, and later retrieving information as necessary.

History of Information Technology: In relative terms, it wasn't long ago that the Information Technology department might have consisted of a single Computer Operator, who might be storing data on magnetic tape, and then putting it in a box down in the basement somewhere. The history of information technology is fascinating! Check out these history of information technology resources for information on everything from the history of IT to electronics inventions and even the top 10 IT bugs.

Modern Information Technology Departments: In order to perform the complex functions required of information technology departments today, the modern Information Technology Department would use computers, servers, database management systems, and cryptography. The department would be made up of several System Administrators,Database Administrators and at least one Information Technology Manager. The group usually reports to the Chief Information Officer (CIO).

(Source: http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/careersintechnology/p/ITDefinition.htm)