An IT Degree and It’s Importance to Business
There are many more people today with computer and web programming skills than there was just five years ago. Advances in programming languages make building basic applications quite simple. However there is much more to information technology (IT) than just programming and an online degree program in this field will teach you the art of successful business computer system design and implementation. Let’s examine some of the areas you will study in your IT online degree program:
You will learn database technologies. IT deals with databases and many online degree programs in this field will start out with one of the most popular database management applications: Microsoft Access. You will learn how to create tables to store business entities like customers, accounts, and inventory items. You will learn how to normalize a database so that it can perform efficiently. With web technologies, you will probably learn the free database management system MySql. Data design concepts transfer between Access and MySql since both are relational databases.
You will learn how to analyze data and processes. The IT professional takes a business problem and translates it into instructions for a programmer to create software applications. This requires interviewing end users of business software to determine what business processes are required in order for them to do their job. The interview also determines what data flows through the business processes. Your IT online degree program will teach you what questions to ask in an interview and how to document the business processes through pseudo code and the data flow diagram. You will learn how to use tools like Visio that can create these diagrams.
Your IT online degree program should teach you object-oriented design techniques. When you go on IT job interviews, one of the most frequently asked questions you will get has to do with object-oriented design and programming. In your IT online degree program, you will learn what an object is and how it is the very building block of elaborate corporate information systems.
A well-rounded IT online degree program will teach you about servers and other computer hardware. One of the components in the corporate information system is the network and servers involved in the transfer of information. Your IT online degree program will teach you about basic server operations and TCP-IP networks which use the protocol of the Internet.
Your IT online degree program should also expose you to concepts of information security. Information security is very important these days with heightened terrorism threats. The attacks of the World Trade Centers on 9/11 proved that a business halts when its data was disrupted as was the case that day. Good security programs make sure information in backed up so that operations can resume at an alternate location. Information security also deals with the prevention of malicious hacker attacks on the corporate system and how to prevent spyware and malware from getting introduced on the corporate intranet.
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Comment by Stuart Marsh on 14 April 2008:
A degree in IT is not about teaching you to program.
It’s about teaching you the design and analysis techniques that you can apply to any programming language you like, for the rest of your career.
A lot of application programmers fall down on this point when they start writing larger programs that need scalability.
Comment by Admin on 29 April 2008:
I do not think that is what the author implied. I think it is fair to say some IT professionals learn some programming skills to help them be more proficient in their field of expertise. However the primary definition of an IT degree would be to create professionals to design, run and maintain the technology that makes the systems in many important industries function. Agreed?