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Wednesday, 5 March 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
the knowledge economy, impacts on society and most importantly employment opportunities resulting from it.
As we all know, ICT stands for Information and Communications Technology. A few years ago, we used to use the acronym IT, however almost universally we have started to move towards ICT. The “C” in ICT represents communications. A few years ago, senior professionals from the communications and more specifically telecommunications industry started to lobby the IT bodies around the world requesting to recognise the importance of communications and telecommunications in IT. Today, the industry and academia at large have accepted it.
Information technology refers to using technology to handle information. Note that we are talking about “information”, which is different from “data”. Data may not be that useful, but once improved and processed, it can be converted into useful and meaningful pieces of facts, which can be called as “information”. When we use technology in this context, it is broadly termed as information technology.
In more serious words, it has been defined as follows: “Information technology (IT) is the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.”
Now, if IT is about applying technology for handling of information, don’t we need communication and telecommunication type technologies to move the data and information around? Most arguably, Yes! Hence the inclusion of “C” in between “I” and “T”. IT isn’t effective without the “C” component.
ICT is a broad industry. For starters, there is hardware based industry and software based one. For example, companies like Intel predominantly work in the hardware sphere. This industry is involved in manufacturing and support services relating to hardware such as physical computers, hard disks, network infrastructure, cables, memory cards, printers and so many other things. The key here is that they are ‘hard’ or physically touchable.
Hardware doesn’t work alone. They have to be told what to do. They have to be instructed. People can’t instruct them because they wouldn’t understand what we say, but we can convert our instructions into a format that is understandable by these hardware. These set of codes, which are also called as “programs” in ICT speak are largely tagged as “software”. They are untouchable by humans when compared to hardware, therefore are termed “soft”.
In addition to hardware and software, there is a significant services based side in the ICT industry as well. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) also goes closely with ICT. It is about outsourcing specific business functions or processes to a third party provider. Typically, these functions tend to be non-core for organisations. For example, if a company is in the banking sector, technical support for its staff, accounting entries and even some ICT activities are non-core to its main business. So, they can be outsourced while the company can concentrate on its core business. ICT facilities such as connectivity can be used to outsource these to other locations (i.e.: ITES – IT Enabled Services).
The companies that do software development or other direct ICT related services or products as its core business is just one side of the industry, but there are companies in other industries which do not operate ICT as the core business but still have a significant ICT component. There are ICT job opportunities available in these other industries as well. An in-house ICT service/help desk of a company in the garment industry, graphics design section of a publishing house, ICT department of an agriculture business and systems maintenance division of a hospital are just a few examples.
The vision of the Sri Lankan Government is for the IT/BPO industry is to become the top revenue earner for the country by 2016, with a target of $ 1 billion in export revenue and direct employment to increase to 100,000 and indirect to 150,000. Today, more than 300 IT and BPO companies have operations in Sri Lanka with more than 60,000 people earning more than $ 600 million in exports.
