Does anything really change in IT?

Does anything really change in IT?

IT has advanced a lot in the past nine years, but CIO concerns remain largely unchanged

This is my last column for IT Week as me and the monkeys are off to pursue some more interesting, erm, pursuits. Incredibly, it has been nine years since I started writing about IT A- by mistake. To be honest, it seems longer.

I was full of beans, and apparently in possession of a full head of hair, when I started working for IT Week. Having come from a job at the BBC where email and internet users were few and far between, I can still remember the excitement I felt settling into an office that was wired and ready to cruise the information superhighway. I remember the thrill I got on first seeing a Handspring PDA, and I can remember who it was that downloaded the Iloveyou virus, and in so doing ensured the whole office got the rest of the day off. We were writing about virus attacks, and suffering from them as well. It was like being in the front line of a dreadfully geeky war.

While here, I have weathered the Y2K storm, and followed the Information Commissioner's Office as it tried to work out under what circumstances businesses should be allowed to spy on their staff A- something that took a very long time indeed. And surely I can't be the only person in the country that really, really, really wanted to trade my MiniDisc player in for a 64MB MP3 player.

None of these experiences did much for my social life, though. For my colleagues and, hopefully, IT Week's target audience, developments around the Millennium Bug and data privacy were intensely interesting, but mention them in a club or bar, and people would look at you as if you'd just sneezed into their Singapore Sling.

Many of my columns over the years seem to have elicited similar reactions from certain readers, judging from a pile of letters that I uncovered when I started to clear my desk.