Today, we have forgotten the way things were before IT. With a telephone or a laptop at hand, to get in touch with a friend on the other side of the world, to complete a project in collaboration with an international team, to take an exam without going out — all this is taken for granted these days. New technological tools such as the Internet, computers, wireless devices, social networks have become a part of our life regardless of gender or age.
How comes that within a relatively short period of time we delegated multiple tasks to IT and let it change our lives in many domains? The proliferation of computers and the rapid development of the Internet falls on the 1990s. Over the course of thirty years, the way we live, communicate, work, study, and do business has undergone a dramatic transformation.
The advocates of IT believe that all the changes are to the better, opponents, on the contrary, promote the attitude that IT development has been worsening life of people. We are going to focus on a few positive changes in learning, working and doing business brought about by Information Technology.
Education sphere
It is a universally acknowledged truth that the quality and conditions of life are improved through better knowledge. The impact of IT on learning is hard to overestimate. Education has become available and affordable due to IT. Statistics show that in 2018 the number of students taking online courses increased by 5.7%
These days, world universities compete to attract students from all over the world to the online courses, which are, due to the IT, no different from those on site. Students attend lectures, ask questions, participate in small group discussions, do tests just the way their fellow students at the university do. Affordability of online education is substantially higher and more students can enroll in the course they want to do. Forecasts are that e-learning will grow into a $325bn industry by 2025.
Distance education has never been easier to get access to, even if you are not assigned to any university as a student. Opportunities for lifelong learning are closer than they have ever been.
Massive open online courses first introduced in 2006 and gaining traction as a popular mode of learning are the game changer. MOOCs provide interactive courses using such format as online lectures, forums, quick quizzes, and assignments, as well as immediate feedback to the tasks. To become a part of a community, you only need to register and pick the course you find value-adding. With the abundance of the offers, the choice is not going to be easy.
Work and environment domain
The impact of IT on work and workplaces has increased over the last two decades of the 21st century. IT has been helping the workers to get the job done to such a degree that nowadays it is hard to imagine that there were days when the work was done in some different way.
Take means of communication. It has never been easier to get in touch with anyone you need via email, conference call, voice mail or mobile application. Email, for instance, is responsible for productivity increase as well as for growing prosperity, as there are few things of more importance than information sent and received timely. And a mobile application has become a must-have for businesses of different types as they are really convenient tools for any field of commerce.
One can’t underestimate improved access to information. Employees today have all the necessary data at their fingertips; it hardly ever takes more than two seconds to access the information. Security is not compromised on, though. One of the priorities of the IT sector is security measures, which are being continuously improved. Highly sensitive documents can be safely sent and signed electronically due to the increased level of security.
Data evaluation and analysis take less time than ever before as they are performed by machines using carefully designed and developed software.
Business sector
IT has considerably advanced the way companies do business. The fast speed the information is spread with has caused remarkable changes in the processes. Automation left no areas untouched and is still in progress. Data processing and reporting that used to take hours if not entire days are the matter of a time slot in a daily to-do list of employees.
Collaboration with an international team staying in the homy atmosphere of your apartment or doing a job for an employer from another continent are the realities of today’s employment.
With the development of IT, businesses turned to serious changes in their organizational structure to tap into the potential of more economical ways of production and service providing. It is due to IT that today such terms as outsourcing and out-stuffing have taken their places in contemporary business vocabulary.
Not only processes or organizational structure but entire business sectors like, for instance, sales have been transformed by IT. E-commerce is booming, leaving physical stores either to die or to desperately search for innovations to return customers to their warm embrace.
No matter whether you are a proponent of the IT, or you believe that we were better off without any gadgets, the truth is that the difference in the life before and after the IT is striking. Moreover, the development of IT is going to surprise us with currently unimaginable innovations in the future.
A blogger and marketer. I have my Master's in Marketing.
