So today's post is about ICT. This post is for the mid-term test scores. My lecturer gave a task for us to create a blog and post something ICT-related in it. I was thinking of making a new blog but then I thought it was such a waste of time and beside, I already have a blog so a post about something not-so-personal (cough) is okay in a personal-blog, right?
Okay so, here's what I decided to post. Enjoy...
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is often used as an extended
synonym for information technology (IT), but is a more
specific term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone
lines and wireless signals), computers as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware,
storage, and audio-visual systems, which enable users to access, store,
transmit, and manipulate information.
The term ICT is also used to refer to
the convergence of
audio-visual and telephone networks with computer
networks through a single cabling or link system. There are large
economic incentives (huge cost savings due to elimination of the telephone
network) to merge the telephone network with the computer network system using
a single unified system of cabling, signal distribution and management.
History of the Term
The phrase Information and
Communication Technology has been used by academic researchers since the 1980s,
and the term ICT
became popular after it was used in a report to the UK government by Dennis Stevenson in 1997
and in the revised National
Curriculum for England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2000. But in
2012, the Royal Society recommended that the term ICT
should no longer be used in British schools "as it has attracted too many
negative connotations", and with effect from 2014 the National
Curriculum was changed to use the word computing
reflecting the addition of computer programming to the curriculum.
A leading group of universities consider ICT
to be a soft subject and advise students against studying A-level ICT,
preferring instead A-level Computer Science.
Global Costs of IT
The money spent on IT worldwide has been most
recently estimated as US $3.5 trillion and is currently growing at 5% per year
– doubling every 15 years. The 2014 IT budget of US federal government is
nearly $82 billion. IT costs, as a percentage of corporate
revenue, have grown 50% since 2002, putting a strain on IT budgets. When
looking at current companies’ IT budgets, 75% are recurrent costs, used to
“keep the lights on” in the IT department, and 25% are cost of new initiatives
for technology development.
The average IT budget has the following
breakdown:
- 31% personnel costs (internal)
- 29% software costs (external/purchasing category)
- 26% hardware costs (external/purchasing category)
- 14% costs of external service providers (external/services).
ICT Development Index
The ICT Development Index compares the level
of ICT use and access across the world.
The WSIS Process and ICT Development Goals
On 21 December 2001, the United Nations General Assembly
approved Resolution 56/183, endorsing the holding of the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing
today's information society.
According to this resolution, the General Assembly related the Summit to the United Nations Millennium Declaration's
goal of implementing ICT to achieve Millennium Development Goals. It also
emphasized a multi-stakeholder approach to achieve these goals, using all
stakeholders including civil society and the private sector, in addition to
governments.
