Information Technology (it), As Defined By The Information Technology Association

Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware."[1] IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information. Today, the term information has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems. The role of information technology:Information technology (IT) has historically played an important role in Bussiness. It is considered by some as a major enabler for new forms of working and collaborating within an organization and across organizational borders.

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Shared databases, making information available at many places

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Expert systems, allowing generalists to perform specialist tasks

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Telecommunication networks, allowing organizations to be centralized and decentralized at the same time

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Decision-support tools, allowing decision-making to be a part of everybody's job

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Wireless data communication and portable computers, allowing field personnel to work office independent

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Interactive videodisk, to get in immediate contact with potential buyers

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Automatic identification and tracking, allowing things to tell where they are, instead of requiring to be found

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High performance computing, allowing on-the-fly planning and revisioning

Q:- How is data managed by organization? Write about the technical foundation of Database management system. Ans:- Data are raw facts or observations typically about physical phenomenon or business transactions.More specifically data are objective measurements of the attributes (or characteristics) of entities (suchas people, places, things and events).organizations – Big and Small – generate lot of data in terms of activities they perform. Even individuals need to handle lot of data in their day to day data storage and retrieval is one of the central activities in Information processing. In early days of business, Data banks existed in the minds of key Personnel in the business. As the volume and complexity increased several tools like, Books, records, manuals, drawings etc., were devised as “Data banks” and manual procedures and skills were evolved to retrieve information from these

banks when needed. But now the data are stored in various ways. New new technology has been developed to store and manage voluminous data in very convenient and protective way. For example hard Disk, CD, Maganetic Disk,Pen Drive etc are used to store large and complex data. However these techniques were not reliable and fast enough when the information involved was huge and complex. Hence business decisions could not be accurate and timely. To correct this Lacuna, Information systems were computerized. The speed and accuracy of computers resulted in tremendous improvement of reliability and timeliness of information generated. This process however, involved the development of techniques and tools to handle data banks on computers, namely, the tools to store and retrieve information in computers. The development of such techniques and tools resulted in what are known as DBMS packages. Integrated databanks stored in Computer Systems are called “Databases. Database management system (DBMS) is a software lies between the physical database and users of the system. All the requests coming from users for data manipulation are handled by the DBMS. DBMS provides computational capacity to store, retrieve,edit, sort and perform computations including statistics upon data, which it extracts from its storage. The tasks handled by DBMS packages can be classified as: a. Database Development - Define, organize the content, relationships and structure of the data needed to build a database. b. Database Interrogation - Access the data in a database to display information in various Formats. Users can selectively retrieve and display information and produce forms, reports, and other documents. c. Database Maintenance - Add, delete, update, and correct the data in a database. d. Application Development - Develop prototypes of queries, presentation forms, reports for a Proposed business application. Technical foundation of DBMS:Redundancy can be minimized : If each department in a company maintains files of employee data, customers data, sales data etc, leads to wastage of storage space, and also there will be considerable redundancy of data ( same data is stored in many places),this leads to inconsistency also when data is updated. In case of database, the DBA can integrate these files suitably and hence redundancy can be eliminated. Inconsistency can be avoided: If the data is redundant then there is possibility that the data becomes inconsistent when updated, if not updated properly in all places. But inconstancy can be removed if a given fact is represented by a single entry. The data can be shared: The data stored for one application, can be used for another application. Thus, the data stored in the database for one application can be shared/used with new applications. Security can be enforced : Database administrator (DBA) has full control over the operational data, he can define the access paths for accessing the data stored in the database and also DBA can define authorization checks whenever access to sensitive data is attempted by unauthorized users. Integrity of Data can be kept intact : Centralized control can also ensure that adequate checks are incorporated in the DBMS to provide data integrity. Various consistency constraints can be applied to maintain the integrity of the data. This is possible because the whole data is available in one single place. Standards can be enforced: While developing applications for storing, manipulating the database, Database Administrator, can ensure that the international, national, industry, company standards are followed. Backup and recovery can be provided: Recovery from hardware or software failure is possible, BSIT 24 Basics of DBMS

the DBMS must provide this. For this purpose we have backup and recovery subsystem. Responsible for both backup of the data and recovery whenever failure occurs.