This book aims to sum up what has happened in a particular area of technological endeavour and assess its impact with a view to future interactions by those who use the developed systems.
It highlights in its four parts:
- 1.
people and technology;
- 2.
infrastructures;
- 3.
application of technology (in particular healthcare/retail/finance); and
- 4.
future views.
The four parts do integrate to a whole despite the fact that each section is written by a different author and one does wonder why this tactic was chosen because of the obvious difficulties in continuing this special theme. Indeed, it is surprising that the future offers such little scope for either prediction or discussion and was summarized in a very concise final part.
Even so you need hardly to be an expert IT specialist to follow what is essentially a simple theme, which covers current technology, its evolution, how it is likely to change and what the future holds.
Indeed, any book that currently can tell us some of the answers to the way we are going to use the ever‐changing technological innovations both now, and in the future, faces an enormous challenge.
Those who work in technology will find very little new and only an analysis of the present‐day state of IT use and application that is pretty obvious. The predictions for future use are changing as we review the authors' words.
We should not dismiss this text since it does discuss some important issues that cyberneticians and systemists have always had much interest in. Technology and people, applications of new and existing technology are well‐worth discussing. This book does at least recognise this need and most importantly the need to prepare for what we all know is an unknown and probably unpredictable future.
