IT or Information technology is a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange, and use information in its various forms of business data, voice conversations, still images, motion pictures, multimedia presentations, and other forms, including those not yet conceived. It's a convenient term for including both telephony and computer technology in the same word. It is the technology that is driving what has often been called "the information revolution." The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones
Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in about 3000 BC,but the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing, the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.
Four distinct phases of IT development:
Pre-mechanical (3000 BC – 1450 AD)
Mechanical (1450–1840)
Electromechanical (1840–1940)
Electronic (1940–present)
The recent advances of Information Technology are becoming central to the process of social-economic development. Information Technology offers new way of exchanging information, and transacting business, changes the nature of the financial and other service sectors provides efficient means of using the human and institutional capabilities of countries in both the public and private sectors. The world is rapidly moving towards knowledge based economic structures and