Given below are some of the areas the gains of information technology (computer age) have manifested:
(a) The Office
(b) Manufacturing Industry(c) Health
(d) Finance and Commerce
(e) Military Institution
(f) Education and Training
(g) Leisure
THE OFFICE:
The Mechanised Office started in the second half of the 19th Century with the introduction of Typewriter and Telegraph. Within the 1st half of the 20th Century, additional office technologies had been developed. These are: Automatically switched Telephone, Electric Typewriter, Telex, Duplicating machines, Adding Machines, etc. The rise of Electronics during and after the Second World War brought about a gradual replacement of the Mechanical equipment by the smaller, more reliable more versatile equivalent, e.g. Private Branch Telephone Exchange, Electronic Typewriters, Display Terminals, Copiers and Computers.
Office Automation helps to keeps management about the state of production, stocks, and personnel etc, as part of management information system (MIS).
More interestingly today, is the talk about electronic office. This is where an office will have a central computer connected to by various officers via terminals in their homes and carry out their official assignments. The most important advantage of this system is speed at which jobs are handled with this system and cutting of cost of transportation by staff from their homes to their various offices. The demerit lies in the fact that their would be lack of social interaction among staff and inadequate privacy of data and job operations. As well there would be lack of superior control of subordinates and the cost of implementing such a system is high.
MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY:
Manufacturing Industries are among the first and most well established fields of application of information technology. It has provided tools for production planning, production design and industrial research. The earliest application of information technology to the manufacturing industries was the Jacquard Loom, where the weaving pattern was controlled by sequence of punched cards. Based on principle, the Numerical Control (NC) of Machine tools came to being in 1952 and started to appear commercially in the early 60’s and took another 10 years before the Paper Tape was replaced by programs stored in the memory of the computers. In such Computer Numerical control (CNC) Machine, various aspects of the machine processing happen under a pre-programmed computer control.
Other areas where information technology has done very well are Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), computer
Aided Design (CAD). Computer Aided Design was successfully applied to many fields outside the manufacturing unit, such as computer itself, Architectural and Building Industries.
HEALTH:
Computer-Controlled life support systems can monitor a patient’s condition via a number of sensor devices checking on, for example, pulse rate, body temperature and blood pressure. This frees nurses for other duties. Computed-assisted diagnosis systems make use of artificial intelligence to assist a physician in diagnosing a patient condition. Another interesting development is the use of the computer to assist the plastic surgeon in the repairs of facial injuries or deformities.
FINANCE AND COMMERCE:
Every money transactions are of importance to information technology. A record usually needs to be made either formally or informally about the amount, the purpose, the parties involved, and the date of transaction etc previously recorded on paper and processed by hand or by means of slow Electromechanical machine. This device certainly was inadequate hence it failed in face of massive growth in transactions.
Information Technology has provided us with very good methods of transacting business, e.g. West Union Money Transfer operate by First Bank of Nigeria Plc and the use of point of sale terminals (POS).
MILITARY APPLICATION:
Computer and Telecommunication technologies have been employed for Military purposes ever since their beginning-calculation of ballistics of artillery shells and transmission and decoding messages are among the best-recorded uses of these technologies. The automated battlefield concept includes Missiles, which find their pre-programmed target with very high accuracy.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING:
Information Technology is mostly widely used in broadcasting (Telephone, Radio, etc). Other areas where IT is applicable are Computer Assisted Training (CAT), Computer Managed Learning (CML), with training material such as TUTORIAL on a screen-based terminal. Computer Managed Learning monitors the responses, and answer to the parts of questions.
The computer records progress of the learner.
LEISURE:
One of the common use of computer by many today is for whiling away of time when they are bored with work. There are a lot of games than one can play with computer system. Most desktops come with games preinstalled with the operating system and other games can be bought and installed for leisure hours. One can either play such games with the computer or play alone or play with some one else and having the computer as the umpire.
COMPUTER AS AN AID TO LAWYER
Computers are used in many law chambers to record cases and courts proceedings. With Expert system and artificial intelligence that characterise the fifth generation computers of today, computers with a well developed database is capable of determining and revealing various defence strategies based on similar cases that have been determined somewhere else before.
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