Unlike what many people may think, information technology is an unstructured world, a rapidly changing world, and, to some, an undisciplined world. Without belaboring the point, we have entered a period in which tech- nology, with all its power and all its flaws, has become essential to our future. Its continued refinement is essential to economic, social, and polit- ical health. But things are not as clean and neat and structured or as disci- plined as we may wish them to be. I bring this up because the Y2K problem is affecting the technology of information, which has grown to be an important part of how we think, how we act, and how we progress as a human race.
Information technology is everywhere.
And it is going to be even more prevalent in the future. We are all very dependent on it, and we will become more and more dependent on it as time passes. Information technology is different from most other technologies with which we are familiar. One of the differences is that it is programmable, meaning that we can build logic and processes into it, and we can easily change that logic and modify those processes. As a result, many of the business rules and operating procedures of organizations are written into computer programs.