infoTECH Feature

April 15, 2011

What is Information Technology?

Information technology is one of those terms that people have started to throw around these days, using it to describe anything related to technology whatsoever. But, in fact, that tendency is what sprouted the term originally. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the first use of the term “information technology” appeared in a 1958 edition of the Harvard Business Review when referring to a type of technology that did not yet have an official term attached to it. Today, the term has become a bit more centralized.

Referring to any area of computer hardware, software, data, programming, multimedia, or mechanisms that visually portray those processes, information technology encompasses all aspects of computer-related systems. Modernly shortened to “info tech,” the term also includes processes in the telecommunications industry that are related to the retrieval, transmittal and storage of information.  

As technology has rapidly developed over the last several decades, a burgeoning need for more hefty data processing systems has grown in a global sense. Information technology covers the broad range of techniques and methods used to handle information processes through computers and/or automatic procedures.

Incorporating voice data, image processing, video management, and file transfer, information technology is essentially its own industry now including any computer administration of these systems. Initially used in reference to office processes which required the storage of information, information technology has now percolated through to the traditional consumer’s home and become a more pedestrian reference to almost all technological processes.

Information technology is now a global industry, a college degree, a field of study, a professional occupation, and used on a daily basis by millions of people.


Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Janice McDuffee

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