Information Technology

IT stands for Information Technology. It is simple pronounce I T, the two separate letters. In most organizations it is the computer department. The place where all the geeks gather to hunch over clicking keyboards to get the computer to do some wonderful new trick. That is what people imagine. In fact the IT departments are one of the key elements in today's technology. Without IT departments, there would be many items we commonly take for granted no longer available to us.

IT departments are responsible for every banking system in the world today. It was the IT departments who first made it possible for online banking. It was the IT department who came up with computer software designed to allow the use of debit and credit cards. Lending institutions and finance companies who depend on amortization calculators would have to go back to figuring by hand with out the use of the programs developed by IT departments.

In short, if a computer generated the program for the device or system you are using, it was an IT department somewhere who designed it. Thus was born the business analyst. The business analyst may or may not have been from the IT department. He or she may not be able to write code. They do know the intricacies behind it. They are the ones able to speak with others to determine what the IT department should be doing.

The system works something like this. The stakeholder, someone in business or with a business interest, has an idea he or she thinks may sell or make the business more money. The idea may only generate an easier way of doing things. Faster production means less man hours. Less man hours means less payroll. Less payroll means more money for the company to spend somewhere else. The problem came when the stakeholder tried to explain what he or she wanted from the IT department. The IT department caught on to the general concept and designed an application for the program. The stakeholder found he could not use the code. Enter the business analyst.

Will DRM Save the Record Industry ?

Without a doubt the single most influential agent of change in business trends in the last ten to twenty years has been the internet. There is virtually no business segment or market that has gone unchanged by this powerful force. But of all of the various businesses impacted by cyberspace, the music industry has to the one that has seen the most dramatic change and the greatest challenge to keep up, adapt and survive an onslaught of change unprecedented in its history.

The first major challenge that cyberspace brought to the music business was a complete shift to how music would be sold to music fans worldwide. In what can only be described as an avalanche, the music buying public virtually abandoned conventional record stores and retail outlets and took the majority of their music purchasing business online. But this mass influx of business could not be tracked to any one web site that was executing the revolution. Because of a revolution in how bands and Indie record labels do business online, the music audience followed and began buying their CDs and even concert tickets directly from artists or record labels online and getting those products instantly via downloads.

But as drastic as the market changes this paradigm shift in consumer behavior represented, it was nothing compared to what the internet had in store for the music world. The next wave of change represented a threat to the music business so serious that it had the potential of putting the music industry out of business forever. When music consumers began to share digital music electronically over the internet using file sharing software such as Kazaa, Limeware and BitTorrent, suddenly it was possible for a music customer to access all the music they wanted for free by simply downloading this music from another internet user’s computer.