IT has come a long way

Using technology to improve the way you do business

By Michael Burns

In honour of CAmagazine’s 100^th birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the evolution in information technology over the past few decades. Of course, IT didn’t exist 100 years ago -- and neither did I. Still, looking back, I feel like I lived with the dinosaurs. The following shows just how far we have come.

1970s: In my first job, I worked with a large retailer. Employees filled in forms for inventory transfers, sales, purchases and so on. These were then sent to head office, where one of our 50-or-so keypunch operators entered the information onto punch cards. The cards were sorted by a machine, then read by an IBM mainframe that would update inventory, sales and accounting records. One of my responsibilities was to write job control language for the mainframe. If the system ran into a problem when doing its updating, I got called in the middle of the night. The system could not do its updates during the day because it would have slowed everything else down. Also, some processes required everyone to be off the system. Today, a cell phone has more power than that mainframe I babysat during the night.

1980s: Before the arrival of automated working papers such as Caseware, accountants manually created financial statements and working papers for their clients. I was a CA with strong technical skills who had no choice but to use columnar paper to determine the client’s closing trial balance. We would manually copy the trial balance on the left, then enter the adjusting entries in the middle columns and add the opening and adjusting entries to arrive at a closing balance. You can imagine what happened when there were lots of adjusting entries for one account. My writing is terrible and inevitably the closing balance did not balance. I figured there must be a better way.

I developed a program called the Working Paper Generator, which automated the working papers and financial statements. In the early days, we had to store the program and data on several diskettes, which we would have to swap when using different parts of the system.

At the time, MS-DOS was the language of personal computers and you had to be fairly technical to use it. In the early 1980s, Apple came out with a graphical user interface and in 1985, Microsoft introduced Windows. As of October 2009, Windows had approximately 91% of the market share of client operating systems.

1990s: This is when the Internet emerged as a technology that would end up changing everything. There were not a lot of applications in the early days but hypertext mark up language (HTML) allowed any computer or operating system to read the same Web page, which was in itself a huge advancement. The web also provided a network we could all use to exchange messages. So the first killer application to hit was e-mail. Another application that had huge ramifications was e-commerce. So far, transactions have been mainly between businesses and consumers (B2C).

The ’90s also saw the introduction of client/server technology, which separated applications (which ran on the client) from databases (which ran on the server). Before client/server technology, a user on a network might request, for example, a specific customer record to create an invoice or update an address, write a note, etc. The user’s PC (the client) would fetch the entire customer file and then would have to go fishing for the right record. With client/server, the database was smart enough to send only the one record requested. Because of this improvement, PCs on a network were now able to run accounting/ERP systems with decent performance. SAP was the first to seize on the potential of client/server technology.

2000s: At the beginning of the millennium, client/server (two-tier technology) started to be replaced with three-tier technology, which separates not only the database and application, but also the user interface. Only the user interface is included on the workstation. This allows for a huge jump in performance, because it’s just the interface commands that are transmitted over the Internet.

In the early 2000s, Google also emerged as the second killer Internet application. Can you imagine doing your work without Google?

2010 and beyond: Everything is going mobile. All the major software developers are investing in bringing their applications to you, wherever you might be. And there’s another killer application that is waiting in the wings: business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Through extended markup language (XML) and Web Services, it will be possible for companies to exchange purchase orders and other data without using fax or e-mail and without needing to rekey the data.

It is hard to imagine IT continuing to evolve as quickly as it has over the past few decades. I think the big change ahead lies less in the technology than in the way it is used around the world. Let’s hope it will be used to make the world a better place.

Michael Burns, MBA, CA.IT, is president of 180 Systems (www.180systems.com), which provides independent consulting services, including business process review, system selection and business case development. Contact 416-485-2200; mburns@180systems.com