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The entire history of ‘IT’ and why it’s over.

Paul Kiveal

25 Jul, 2024

The beginning

Having started life as a computer programmer, I’ve since been an IT Manager, an IT Director, and an IT Strategist.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be in ‘IT’ much longer.  Something new has arrived, and IT just got replaced.

I’ve seen IT develop from the start.  Before Information Technology, we had Data Processing. It was very monolithic, and the role of the human ‘operator’ was to feed the computer with the information it needed to process and complete its task.  If they had had fingers and eyes, the human part would not have been required.

The PC revolution changed all that.  With the arrival of productivity apps, such as Word and Excel (especially Excel), the concept of a ‘User’ replaced that of an operator.  The fact that these new PC users could manipulate data to create ‘Information’ is, in my humble opinion, the point where our beloved Information Technology (IT) era started, and it has created countless careers to date.

These careers have evolved as IT has evolved. Initially, IT teams had to manage the growing estate of PCs.  Then they invented servers, and so had to manage a growing estate of these.  Then along came virtualisation, so their careers moved to making their physical servers disappear inside the virtual imagination of various hypervisors.  Next came the Cloud, and IT teams had to learn the language and practices of SaaS, IaaS, DaaS, Baas, and many other cloud hosted services.

Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Apps - The history of IT - String systems

So what’s the latest innovation in IT?

At this point you’ve almost certainly thought of AI, and I think you’re correct.  But we’ll come back to AI a little later.

IT leaders today have mostly accepted that users demand freedom and flexibility in the way they use the IT provided to them.  They’ve largely realised that if they don’t provide this, their users will go away and find ways to work freely, and flexibly, themselves.  We’ve even created a term for this phenomenon: Shadow IT.  It’s the stuff of many a sleepless night for IT leaders, and many a data breach, discovered, or otherwise.

Anyway, that was ‘IT’.  You can now forget all about it because we have just begun a new era, which I suggest might be called ‘KT’, or the Knowledge Technology Era.  Why?  That’s where we can bring AI back into the conversation, because it’s about to uproot everything we know and find comforting, about our old IT paradigm.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is the topic for my next blog, where I’ll dig into its history, impact, and future, however the reason I’ve gone for the idea of AI ushering us into the Knowledge Technology era is because, for the first time, technology is capable of generating new knowledge.  It can do so without the emotional baggage that we carry, it can do so at scale, it doesn’t sleep, and it has access to the previous knowledge of pretty much all of human history.

Here are a few things to ponder ahead of my next blog:

– Your users are already using ChatGPT to process sensitive information that you’d rather wasn’t leaving your organisation
– AI will soon know more about IT than even the smartest of your IT team
– If OpenAI’s predictions are correct, it will soon be smarter than any human
– AI is learning at a phenomenal pace, and how we interact with it, how we treat this nascent intelligence will have profound implications for all of us, not just us ‘IT’ types.

Here at String, we are already out there, talking to our clients about how (and why) they can embrace AI now.  We’re working with their IT teams to ensure that they embed ethical AI into their operations, safely, and securely.

Here’s to the new KT era.  Things are about to get pretty interesting…

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