Data shufflers, value adders, and leveragers of synergies
The IT industry is about data when it comes right down to it. Collect data from various human & non-human sources, do something with it, send it somewhere, store it somewhere, display it somehow. That's why it's called information technology. Not trying to dumb it down, all of those things can be very complex, but I would challenge you to find something in IT that doesn't fit in those categories.
And somewhere in that data shuffling, we in IT hope to add value. Making some business process better, faster, cheaper, or even enabling a new 'thing' that wasn't possible without IT. (Like blogging!) ;-)
My problem with it is that in terms of business IT ... it's so time-consuming (man hours) and therefore expensive. Looking at price of your average business IT project -- projects that statistically are highly likely to be late, go over budget, have critical technical or usability flaws, etc.
So the challenge is making the value to cost ratio as high as possible. The two ways to make that ratio higher are to increase value and decrease costs. Let's take a look at these ...
- Value: What makes IT valuable? Some things that come to mind: ease of use, applicability, relevance, timeliness, and in general, low friction. Think of the software and/or applications you use that really work -- often the ones you don't think about -- and see where they fall the aforementioned categories.
- Cost: Where does all the time go for an IT project, or just IT in general? Again, the low hanging fruit: integration, user interfaces, defects in the software, defects in the process (worse than software defects), testing, business rules & logic, reporting.
- Relevance: An application/system is relevant if it allows you to easily access or create information that is highly useful to you or others, now. Meaning you don't have to click your mouse three million times or scroll through a massive list to get/do what you want. And it should do it for you quickly. For non-UI type processes, they should run intelligently without daily intervention & tell you when there is a problem.
- Integration: Alluding back to the first paragraph, a lot of what IT does is collecting, processing, moving, and displaying information. Data comes from different sources, resides in different places, and is in different forms. The majority of the time, applications require data & processes from multiple systems that need to be integrated to produce relevance. Integration costs a lot of money.
- Today's PC processors are amazingly powerful, and clusters of cheap computers are becoming a reality that is bringing lots of power to the masses.
- The gigabyte is a cheap thing. Terabytes anyone?
- Most people now have 3-5mbps of Internet bandwidth in their homes. Servers can talk to each other cheaply at 1000mbps. My laptop can talk to my home PC at almost 54mbps without wires for < $150, and required surprisingly little of my networking knowledge to get working.
- There are some data standards that mean my {Windows|Linux|Mac} computer can talk to just about any other {Windows|Linux|Mac} computer on the planet. Even though TCP/IP is frighteningly missing a few layers, none would argue it has brought the world a truly global network.
- Storing & searching vast amounts of data is becoming easier. I can search all the public docs on the web in a blazing 0.4 seconds, use a powerful, stable database for free -- (but interestingly can't find an old doc or email on my hard drive in less than 10 minutes.)