Information Technology

Christoph Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore
Imogen Moorhouse, Managing Director, Vicon
Geraldine Grandidier, Director, Tidy Books
Peter McCarthay Ward, Director (East of England), BT

Narrator: It is estimated the IT industry employs nearly 5% of UK workers. Within the UK economy, over three quarters of people use IT as part of their job role. The increased usage of technology is allowing businesses to become more efficient in their working practice. An example of this can be seen through remote access.

Christoph Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore: Most of the work that the system team is doing on a daily basis is remotely login into people's computer when they have a problem, because they can remotely go onto that computer see what's going on and, you know, kill a task or re-launch a task or fix a problem remotely.

Male IT employee: So that's 11.5 terabytes they are using and that's the sequence breakdown.

Christoph Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore: And it can be even from their home when they are on shift.

Narrator: This has been achieved through improvements in wireless technology, mobile communications devices and remote data storage and transfer. However, improvements are not confined to mobility. In product design, and engineering, the use of computer-aided design has improved the efficiency of the manufacturing and the engineering industry, where prototypes can be developed speedily and with impressive accuracy. As well as engineering another area benefiting from IT technology is the health sector. There are a range of developments, including motion capture technology.

Imogen Moorhouse, Managing Director, Vicon: What actually tends to happen is when people report about motion capture they always talk about the films and movies and games and TV but in fact the basis of this technology has come from the live science market. It was very quickly realised to be something that could be used to assist with the assessment of cerebral palsy to help with the surgery, planning and assessment of children who needed operations and people realised very quickly, well if you can use it for that then we can use it for sports performance and sports injury prevention.

Narrator: The social impact technology is having is also significant. Services such as internet banking and online shopping have revolutionalised lifestyles.

Geraldine Grandidier, Director, Tidy Books: Tidy Books started about six years ago. At the time when I had the first website, it was perfectly okay for customers to find you either through ads or on the Web and they'd come on the website, then they would call and make a payment over the phone. But what I did notice with mothers is that a lot of them are going into the shops they would say oh, I haven't got much time, may be some of them are working so I do a lot on the net and have my goods delivered. Courier companies were saying to me, it's just incredible, there's a boom in the Courier business because we are - we are sending so many parcels, people are buying so much online.

Narrator: Future potential lies in improving communication networks further.

Peter McCarthay Ward, Director (East of England), BT: The speeds which people can get from broadband, draw quite a lot of attention and those two are changing, at the moment, the average household can get what's called 3.6 megabits per second. As a network provider, we have constantly to be giving consumers more bandwidth than they presently need. That way we encourage application developers to be innovative and to build more complex and more difficult applications and what our networks can grow alongside them.

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