subject: How It Support Has Evolved Over The Last Decade [print this page] The field of Information Technology (IT) has changed dramatically since the year 2000, to say the least. While some advances were groundbreaking and changed the direction of technological evolution, others were subtle evolutionary changes that held the promise of future revolutions. IT support personnel have to keep up with all the changes, here is how they did so over the last 10 years.
2000 - The notorious New Millennium crashed the myth of Y2K but established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as the management model. An Internet company called Google stuck it out while pets.com and chipshot.com disappeared. Tech personnel had to learn many new things this year, and most knew it was just the start of Something Big.
2001 - The advent of blogs (Web Logs) and the first hints of social media (with millions of users) had major implications in regards to IT support. Conventional measurements of networks count bandwidth and nodes, but connectivity has another dimension called adaptedness. As technologies mature, connectivity surges, even if nodes and bandwidth stay the same (but, of course, they do not). IT support personnel now had more things to become experts at using.
2002 - The Sarbanes-Oxley law (SOX) had major impacts on IT, placing data management and change management at the center of business models and making IT the heart of the once-separate business division, too. VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) exploded on the scene, and numerous companies took up Internet telephony. IT experts now became communications pros, too.
2003 - Virtualization had been a project of many firms, including VMware, since the late 1990s, but in 2003 it had matured. By 2003 the world really did understand how versatile and compelling a solution it was. It was in this year that EMC, a huge storage firm, bought a large part of VMware. When the firm went public in 2007, it had the biggest tech stock debut since Google, and in a listless market, too. Virtualization was here, and IT professionals were on it.
2004 - By 2004, Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) had evolved from its previous launch, where it had created a stir, into a huge force not only among industrial applications, but also as a public medium. Hubs and hot spots marked a new high in connectivity, ably supported by the growing market of portable devices and IT professionals who, once again, expanded their toolkits to cover the evolutionary changes.
2005 - While multicore processors came first from AMD, the microprocessor manufacturer, its arch-rival Intel was hot on its heels. Perhaps in another decade parallel programming will be the standard and we may (some say) come close to matching the skills of the human brain. RFID (Radio Frequency ID) technology exploded in 2005, too. IT support professionals once again expanded their expertise to stay abreast of how these technologies affected a firm's info processing.
2006 - This is they year that some say the network struck back. Growth in average traffic level was 75% and outpaced the capacity growth (47%) on the world's net backbones for the third straight year. The biggest appetite on the Internet belongs to video, which Americans watch to the tune of 100 billion shows a year. New Internet video applications, from movies on demand to TV-over-IP, challenged IT support technicians yet again, but the profession was up to it.
2007 - The iPhone signaled the fact that, in case anyone missed it, Apple was gaining some lost ground in both the IT and communications markets. Their Xserve technology and their new generation of Intel-powered computers pushed IT pros to expand their expertise in non-Windows, non-mainframe applications. The Macintosh's OS X, based on Unix, was a good fit for many IT pros.
2008 - In 2008, Google launched Android, a direct challenge to Apple and its iPhone and, to some observers, a more versatile platform. This was also the year we got the term Pervasive Computing , where nanotechnology is the future of IT, for at least the next decade. The technology signals a completely new era in communications, security and data management, but how these predictions turn out will be affected by how IT professionals implement them. That fact gives many IT professionals great confidence in the near future of computing, and the far future, too.
2009 - Netbooks, miniaturization and digital convergence are the talk of the (global) town. Facebook hits 200+ million members and eBay continues gnawing away at the old retail model. Cloud computing is growing, and the acceleration of technological innovation is increasing. IT professionals support companies remotely as often as they do onsite, and continue to refine the model.
2010 - Apple unveils the iPad, putting the world in an even smaller package. Solid State Drives are getting cheaper all the time, ushering in the new era of no-moving-parts storage systems. The digital convergence continues, and media (movies, music, magazines, etc.) is becoming more mobile, and more malleable, all the time. The ability for individuals to tap into the power of huge databases and processing systems is the new frontier for IT.
IT professionals are the front line in the evolution of technology. A device is only as good as its performance, which is aided by the professionalism and wide-ranging expertise of IT personnel. The job is never done, the learning is never over, and this is what keeps IT exciting as well as productive.
