What IT brought to the world
An essay
By the term IT, I mean anything related to computers, computer networks, electronic communication, web, etc.
One of the aspects IT should have brought to people on this planet is the simplifying and speeding-up of administrative processes like elections to a parliament, public surveys, patients' files at the doctor’s, check-out in supermarkets etd.
Interestingly, I cannot say that IT has failed in this mission. We are really checked out faster at the cash after having finished our shopping, our physician can quickly find data on ourselves (he/she does not have to ask me things like "When did you meet me the last time?", "What medication are you on?" etc). Collecting and, in particular, processing and evaluating input data during a public survey take less effort, less time and brings more accuracy then ever. However, you have probably experienced at least once in your life the "blue death" of your desk top or lap top with Windows. This represents a percent or less of issues that "computer people" face in an IT department of a middle business every day. To keep all systems of a company "up and running", including a web site, intranet applications, database back-ends etc., "an army" of various specialists must be awake almost 24 hours a day.
Now, there are ordinary problems like an employee from a department other than IT reports they cannot see anything on their monitor. It is usually sufficient to unplug and re-plug the video cable. You sometimes lose connection to your critical server and must restart a service on it. Or even the physical machine itself.
But there are more serious problems. A week or two ago the whole world experienced a huge traffic on backbone networks of the Internet which was so overwhelming that you nearly could not reach your favourite sites worldwide because the response times were unbearable.
And there's more.
But why do I mention that all? I have been working in IT for some 15 years. And, step by step, year by year, I can observe that the better and quicker technologies we have the more issues can emerge and the more people in IT are needed to solve them: To protect servers, to carry out research in computer viruses and worms, to fix bugs in applications we daily use etc.
For example, I used to work in an insurance company employing, say, a couple of thousands of people. To support these employees however, they needed more than a hundred of IT specialists, from system administrators, over application developers and project managers, up to testers and bug fixers. The systems are more and more sophisticated. One man is not enough to maintain one application. You must know Microsoft, Apple, or Google employ hundreds or even thousands of engineers in many countries to develop apps, to globalize (internationalize) them, to collect bug reports and support the users etc.
I hope this shall never happen but you cannot guarantee one day there would be more people employed in IT support than those doing "normal" things such as making cars, growing grain and corn, milking cows, painting houses. If this happened however, then I would be really very sceptic on whether IT really helps the world rather than brings more problems than any other area of human activities.
Well, the future shall show up. We'll see...