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Information technology is not expensive

By Jean-Claude Elias - Nov 10,2016 - Last updated at Nov 10,2016

The amount of money we spend on a service or a product should be directly proportional to its importance and to what it brings us. Why is it then that a large number of private users and small enterprises still does not follow this rule that is simple and that makes perfect sense? It is plain logic after all, isn’t it?

We miss a heartbeat when our Internet connection has the slightest hiccup. We feel like dying when we lose data accidentally or unexpectedly. We call the tech support guys with the same sense of emergency as when calling an ambulance to the rescue, each time something goes wrong or an e-mail does not reach its intended recipient in less than 10 seconds.

And yet, despite how critical all these aspects of technology have become, how much we now depend on them, we often fail to acknowledge the fact that data safety, smooth operation, machines reliability and performance require some financial investment.

Early this week we could read in this very newspaper, on the occasion of the visit to Jordan of Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of mega online store Amazon.com, that the ITC (Information and Communications Technology) sector is contributing 12 per cent of the national GDP. If this is not a most striking indicator of its prime importance then what is?

Large enterprises, corporations and most, though perhaps not all, government institutions are doing it rather well and are investing heavily in ITC, be it with direct financing or with human resources, both being obviously closely linked in this case.

The traffic department in the kingdom is a good example of good investment. Indeed, renewing a driving licence or a car’s registration card at the department has become a breeze, thanks to a near-perfect computerisation system. In a similar manner renewing or issuing for the first time an international driving licence at the Royal Automobile Club of Jordan takes a few minutes and does not require moving from counter to counter. Here too, proper investment in IT tools, computers and software has paid off.

Small companies and private users, on the other hand, seem reluctant to spend the right amount of money, until they experience an incident or a problem, when it is often too late to react and to correct the situation. Planning ahead, as in any other human activity, is key to success, performance and stability here.

You cannot really operate a car without paying for maintenance, fuel, insurance, registration, parking, carwash, etc. Computers require attention too and it does involve money.

Using quality hardware components to start with, paying for professional antivirus and Internet security programmes, buying reliable cloud services, paying for additional storage for backup up, whether online or local, and using only qualified technical support personnel, it is all but money well spent. Not to mention being generous, brave and going for the fastest possible Internet subscription. Whatever you’d pay here, it will never be qualified as “expensive”.

 

If in absolute figures our IT or ICT expenditure is going up. In relative value, however, it is more rewarding than ever, given our equally growing IT needs and all that is at stake there.

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