We are income in the information age of a global village today. That way information is the key factor in this era plus it is rightly said that “information is the most precious product of today’s day-to-day business”. all evolves around it whether it is education, medicine, history, ecological phenomena, sports, research or business. You name the system plus information is there to play a key role in its functionality and continuation.
Information can be defined as the facts and figures about anything i.e. the know-how about any object that exists and plays its role in any system. The system is any identified and known work that accepts data / information into itself, manipulates in the shape of certain output(s) and delivers so that it becomes useful and meaningful. And precisely, that is what is known as “Data processing” or “computing”, for which we need a computer to accomplish the task.
Few years back, this accomplished task was available to the computer users/clients in a prescribed locality only. That locality could be his own office or organization. But with the advent of communication technology, our globe has become virtually a one-community area i.e. global village. The organizations expanded to remote cities and countries and it was felt to make the data/information and the ultimate accomplished task available to them where-ever they are. There came communication technology to our rescue and a new term emerged i.e. “information technology” that can be precisely defined as:
“information technology is the technology that merges computing with high-speed communication links carrying data in the form of text, sound, images, video etc”, from place to place over this global village. For this purpose, the computer systems are networked in such a way that the data/information stored/processed on them is always available from anywhere, at any place, at any moment.
Thus, the computer users are almost always sharing and exchanging their information in such a manner as if they are sitting in a drawing room face to face. So in short, information technology enables the heterogeneous types of industries and institutions to a phenomenon known as digital convergence. The digital convergence is the technological merger of various industries/ enterprises through some electronic gadgets that exchange information between them.
The industries are computers, electronics, telecommunications, and mass media etc. it has tremendous significance in modern scenario. It means that from a common electronic base, information can be communicated to any shape that the users are accustomed to see i.e. photographs, movies, audio, graphical shapes, text form, analog diagrams etc.