Making IT Work

In Making IT Work Jeffrey Yost synthesizes what little is known about the history of the computer services (IT) industry in the United States and abroad and deftly combines that knowledge with his own considerable archival work. As the book's subtitle suggests, the narrative sticks closely to the development of computer services—business data processing, computer consulting, facilities management, programming services, and systems integration—so scholars interested in the histories of more well-trodden, and, in terms of revenue, less important industries such as computer hardware (e.g., ENIAC, IBM 650, PCs) or off-the-shelf software (e.g., Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Netscape Navigator) should look elsewhere for enlightenment, as should those interested in strictly technical computing issues. Yost deliberately wrote a mash-up of the sort of papers delivered at meetings of the Society for Historians of Technology and the Business History Conference. A faculty member in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine program and an associate director of the Charles Babbage Institute, both at the University of Minnesota, Yost is uniquely qualified to author a major book on this subject, and his efforts will not disappoint readers who relish the opportunity to pore over 285 pages of dense descriptions, competently composed, of large computer services companies such as Accenture (Ireland), Capgemini (France), Electronic Data Systems (United States), and Wipro (India), as well as of numerous smaller players. The book's introduction, conclusion, and ten body chapters (divided into three sections, covering origins, identity, and geographic and organizational change) tell too many tales to relate in a short review, but the message is that historians of business and technology need to pay much more attention to what has become one of the world's few trillion-dollar industries. In that, the book is utterly convincing

Business · Business history · Economic history · Enlightenment · IBM · Library science · Management · Revenue · Work (physics · Computer Science · Engineering · History · History of Computing Technologies · Information Systems Theories and Implementation