What is ICT in computer with examples?

1.1 Dimensions of Tele-access

ICTs involve much more than just access to information or the technology of the computer, implied by conventional discussion of the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ ICTs shape an individual's, household's, firm's, or nation's access to information, people, services, and technology. The concept of tele-access highlights how ICTs shape access—both electronically mediated and unmediated—to a wide array of social and economic resources.

Social and technical choices about ICTs can reconfigure electronic and physical access to four inter-related resources: information, people, services, and technology (Dutton 1999). The most commonly recognized is access to information. ICTs not only change the way people get information, but also alter the whole corpus of what a person knows and the information available to an individual at any given time and place. ICTs play a role in making some people information rich and others comparatively information poor. But access to information is only one set of relationships shaped by ICTs, and not necessarily the most socially significant.

ICTs also shape access to people. Choices about the design and use of ICTs not only change the ways individuals communicate with one another, but also influence whom individuals meet, talk to, stay in touch with, work with, and get to know. ICTs can connect or isolate people. For example, throughout the 1990s, the most common use of the Internet was for electronic mail (e-mail), that is, for gaining access to people, not for access to information per se.

Third, ICTs shape access to services. ICTs do more than simply change the way people consume information, products, and services. They also influence what products and services a person consumes and whom an individual purchases them from. ICTs can render obsolete a local business or an entire industry, but also create a new business or industry.

Finally, access to particular technologies—equipment, know-how, and techniques—shapes access to other technologies as ICTs interconnect and depend on one another in many ways. For instance, the Internet can provide access to vast numbers of computers around the world, yet a person needs a computer and other ICTs (such as a telephone line, a cable connection, or wireless device) to access the Internet.

There are many other ways in which ICTs can reduce, screen, reinforce, or alter tele-access, such as the content and flow of information, by accident or design. ICTs do not just provide access to more information or more people, many of whom a person would not be in touch with otherwise: they change patterns of interaction between people, information, communities, and organizations. As a substitute for face-to-face communication, for example, ICTs can provide benefits such as reducing travel, saving time, and extending the geography of human community. They may replace valuable human contact with a much less rewarding form of communication, fostering social isolation, or permit communication among people who might never have an opportunity to meet face to face. Tele-access encompasses all these substitutions, enhancements, and much more, by highlighting how people make social and technical choices about ICTs in ways that will reshuffle society, influencing who's in and who's left out.

Introduction

Information and communications technology (ICT) engineers are developing and creating a virtual world offering new services and new applications to help people both in their work and their daily lives. Nevertheless, ICT engineers are almost always constrained in their project development by the intrinsic hardware performances of calculators, storage systems, and communication systems. The monitoring and measurement of physical ICT system performances are crucial to assess the computer processing unit (CPU) load, the available memory, the used bandwidth, and so on to guarantee the ICT-based services correctly work regarding their expected use. The famous Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a chip tends to double every 18 months; this enabled a rapid growth of digital system performances. However, these technical performances do not provide direct information about the level of quality of the offered services. In the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication (ITU-T) standardization sector’s E.800 recommendation (ITU-E800, 1994), quality of service (QoS) is defined as “the collective effect of service performances, which determine the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service.”

The satisfaction of users is then the key of ICT business and must be specified in a service-level agreement (SLA) signed by ICT experts and their customers. By definition, SLA is not a technical document and must be understandable by all stakeholders who are not necessarily aware of ICT terms. Two major issues should be analyzed during the SLA specification: the identification of relationships between the performance indicators defined by the user’s application and ICT technical performances and one related to the monitoring of these indicators to be sure that the contract is fulfilled.

The purpose of translation between ICT and the user’s application performances covers many types of problems. The translation can be direct such as having the application response time correspond to the time for ICT experts to process and transport the applicative request. In this case, the main problem is to clearly define the context of this requirement in terms of number of users, opening hours, and so on and to characterize the type of delay (worst case, average, confidence interval, etc.). However, the translation can be more complex when the user’s requirements are expressed in specific professional terms. For example, the control of an industrial process is assessed by analyzing the stability of its behavior around a set point to be reached. In the research on networked control systems, the identification of impact of ICT performances (and especially network) on industrial process stability requires complex preliminary studies and development of new approaches (Vatanski et al., 2009). One other barrier in the SLA definition is the specification of the user’s requirements with qualitative, not quantitative information. The user’s perception of the quality of a phone call, TV broadcast, Web site, and so on is subjective and complicated to analyze and to associate with quantitative ICT parameters (delay, jitter, etc.). Usually, the user’s perception is transformed in a metric based on mean opinion score using a scale between 0 (no service) and 5 (perfect service) to guide the ICT experts in their technical configurations.

Monitoring indicators specified in SLA is essential to identify the border between the ICT systems and the application itself. The goal is to be able to understand and identify the cause of malfunctions and to determine the stakeholders’ responsibilities. ICT systems must be continually supervised to analyze their performances in order to detect, anticipate, and recover faults. The assessment of ICT performances can be based on measures or models or a combination of both.

Basically, the measurement requires probes, a monitoring system, and standardized protocols to access the whole metrics. Usually, a management information base (MIB) is implemented for each piece of equipment (computer, printer, switch, router, and so on) and supports in a standardized hierarchical structure all the equipment properties (name, OS, version, storage capacities, bandwidth, etc.). The monitoring systems (such as Nagios, Centreon, etc.) can then collect or modify the information stored in MIB by using simple network management protocol (SNMP). This approach is apparently easy to implement, but in practice the selection of pertinent information (regarding the SLA contract) defined in MIB is a complex process. Instead of measuring the parameters of equipment, another solution is to directly analyze the performances of the application or service defined in SLA. For that, robots are developed and simulate the user’s behavior using the application. In all cases, one inherent issue of measurement is its intrusiveness with two consequences: (1) each request for a monitoring ICT system consumes CPU and bandwidth and has an impact on its performance and (2) the response time of a monitoring request depends on the performance of the ICT infrastructure.

Another approach to assess ICT performances is to use mathematical theories from one of two methods, constructive and black box. The constructive methods are based on the assembly of elementary components with specific properties; their combination can be used to estimate average delays, average buffer occupation (queuing theory) or bounded delays, and backlog bounds (network calculus theory) (Georges et al., 2005). In the second method, the ICT system or a part of it is considered as a black box and its behavior (output) is analyzed regarding the changes of ICT parameters (input). From this analysis (i.e., experiment design method), a model of the ICT system can be defined. The black box method is less generic than the constructive method, but it is better correlated with real ICT properties.

With a monitoring system, it is very interesting to couple the measures and models. The models represent the expected behavior of an ICT system and the measures its real behavior. A difference between models and measures can be used to detect anomalies and to anticipate faults according to a trend analysis. This combination of models and measures is one way to develop a successful monitoring system.

Since the birth of computer science and telecommunications, their performance evaluation mainly focused on technical and cost indicators. But, as explained in the beginning of this introduction, the final goal of ICT is to facilitate people’s lives without undesirably affecting either their health or quality of life. Therefore, these effects also should be assessed during the full life cycle of an ICT product or ICT-based solutions in considering its manufacturing step, its use step, and its next life. An overall assessment of pollution must be performed to determine the ICT carbon footprint, the toxic material rate used in ICT devices, and so on, which impacts the health of people. Moreover, the Earth’s resources used for ICT must be continually decreased to preserve the quality of life of current and future generations. The preservation of the Earth’s resources includes recycling and extensive use of renewable energy. On another issue, quality of life is also related to ethical questions for both employees in ICT companies and ICT users with general considerations such as the salary of employees, the gender balance, and so on, or questions more specific to the ICT area such as the protection of privacy and personnel data.

In summary, ICT must be assessed using the three Ps or pillars of sustainable development (Figure 3.1) during the engineering process of the target system as a whole by balancing people, planet, and profit requirements with the final objective to design green ICT solutions.

ICT engineering should be systemic in order to analyze the negative or positive effects among the three pillars. For example, the mitigation of data center energy consumption is interesting both in terms of the environment and profit. But increasing data center capacity to grow business activities consumes more energy, generating a negative impact on the planet. The well-known analysis using a C2C fractal tile tool (Donough and Braungart, 2002) is a new challenge and obligates ICT engineers to study the solution spaces not only on business and technical performances but also in associating new metrics coming from ecology and ethics. Thus, the SLA specifications are more complex in integrating additional requirements. This complexity can be managed in using systems engineering to guarantee that the development of ICT products, services, and ICT-based solutions is sustainable and measurable for validation and verification of all technical solutions. The sustainability is not only expressed in term of longevity of solutions but also must include properties of modularity, flexibility, scalability, and recyclability.

The objective of this chapter is to show the different aspects of ICT metrics. The chapter is then organized as follows: Section “ICT Technical Measures” briefly explains the traditional metrics used to assess intrinsic ICT performances. Section “Ecological Measures And Ethical Consideration” focuses on the performance indicators specific to the environment and ethics. From a simple ICT architecture, Section “Systems Engineering for Designing Sustainable ICT-Based Architectures” presents systems engineering approach to specify and to consider the measures in Green ICT-based solutions. Section “Conclusion” concludes the chapter.

Use of information and communication technology for health-care self-management

ICTs provide convenient ways for individuals to store, access, and transmit information and personal data. Use of the Internet as a resource for identifying health symptoms, locating health-care providers, and storing personal health information has become more common among the general population and is critical for improving quality of life for many individuals. These technology solutions, often described as eHealth or mHealth technologies, include systems such as health portals and databases for storage of individual health history, telemedicine devices, electronic learning tools, and mobile health devices. Such technologies have potential to be an advantageous resource for health maintenance and promotion among older adults, with 67% of adults over 65 currently using the Internet and 42% using mobile smartphones on a frequent basis according to Pew Research Center data (Anderson & Perrin, 2017).

The readily accessible nature of many ICTs presents them as a method for bridging the digital gap that has long existed among older adults. In this way the use of ICTs may increase independence in health maintenance, where mobile devices and Internet systems serve as personal tools allowing individuals to manage their health at their own discretion through remote interactions with health-care professionals (i.e., telemedicine), potentially eliminating barriers to in-person health care.

Current reports on the use of health-related ICTs find that as of 2013, 71% of older adults are using Internet sources for seeking health information (Fox & Duggan, 2013), with a likelihood that this percentage will increase as older adults become more technically savvy. More specifically, older adults reportedly have an interest in leveraging mobile ICTs for the management of specific health conditions and organizing and keeping up with health appointments (Davidson & Jensen, 2013; Fox & Duggan, 2013). While the percentage of older adults using Internet resources to search for health information is projected to grow, the use of medical messaging and communication has substantially increased (49% of adults over the age of 65, according to the National Poll on Healthy Aging) (Clark, Singer, Solway, Kirch, & Malani, 2018), despite many older adults reporting a preference for in-person health discussions. Understanding the current ways in which older adults use ICTs and potential reasons for nonuse may serve as a useful starting point for designing better ICTs used for health maintenance.

Although there is evidence of the relevance of ICTs as health-care solutions in supporting caregivers, or medical professionals, there is also great potential for the use of ICTs in managing chronic conditions and also maintaining wellness among older adults themselves. Thus we focus on health-related ICTs that have the potential to be used by older adults themselves, instead of those that are used on them by medical personnel.

1 Introduction

Green Computing has become much more than a buzz phrase. The greening of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has grown into a significant movement among manufacturers and service providers. Even end users are rising to the challenge of creating a green society and sustainable environment in which our development and use of information technology can still flourish. Environmental legislation and rising operational and waste disposal costs obviously lend force to this movement, but so do public perceptions and corporate images. For instance, environmental concerns have a growing impact on the ICT industry’s products and services, and they increasingly influence the choices that ICT organizations make (environmental criteria are now among the top buying criteria for ICT-related goods and services).

Most ICT providers now prioritize choices that reduce long-term, negative environmental impact instead of just reducing operational costs. Over a computing system’s lifetime, the array of costs includes design, verification, manufacturing, deployment, operation, maintenance, retirement, disposal, and recycling. All of these include an ICT component, themselves. Green ICT thus spans:

environmental risk mitigation;

green metrics, assessment tools, and methodologies;

energy-efficient computing and power management;

data center design and location;

environmentally responsible disposal and recycling; and

legislative compliance.

Murugesan notes that each personal computer in use in 2008 was responsible for generating about a ton of carbon dioxide per year [33]. In 2007–2008, multiple independent studies calculated the global ICT footprint to be 2% [50] of the total emissions from all human activity. While the growing ICT sector’s global emissions will continue to rise (by a projected 6% per annum through the year 2020 [50]), increases in products and services and advances in technology will potentially bring about greater reductions in other sectors. The implications of Green Computing thus reach far beyond the ICT sector itself.

One factor in this growing carbon footprint is the steadily increasing amount of total electrical energy expended by ICT. As computer system architects, the obvious first step that system designers can take toward addressing the larger problem of total emissions footprint is to reduce operational power consumption. Although power efficiency is but one aspect of this multifaceted environmental problem, the design of more power-efficient systems will help inform solutions that impact other aspects. The most robust solutions are likely to come from hardware/software codesign to create hardware that provides more real-time power consumption information to software that can leverage that information to save power throughout the system. Until such combined solutions exist, though, we still need to reduce power consumption of existing platforms. This chapter discusses an approach to achieving this reduction for current systems.

Power-aware resource management requires introspection into the dynamic behavior of the system. In Section 2, we first discuss some of the challenges to obtaining this information. Our solution is to use performance monitoring counters (PMCs). Such counters are nearly ubiquitous in current platforms, and they provide the best available introspection into computational and system activity. We use PMC values to build per-core power consumption models that can then be used to generate power estimates to drive resource management decisions. For such models to be useful, we must verify their accuracy, which requires a means to measure dynamic power consumption. In Section 3, we thus describe a set of power-measurement techniques and discuss their pros and cons with respect to their use in better resource management. In Section 4, we set the context by surveying previous power modeling work before explaining our methodology in detail. In Section 5, we present a case study of power management techniques that leverage this methodology.

Abstract

Information and communications technology (ICT) is an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems, and so on, as well as the various services and applications associated with them, such as videoconferencing and distance learning. Traditional and conventional approaches to the design, implementation, and validation of ICT systems typically deal with one core system concern or two system concerns at a time, for example, the functional correctness or reliability of an enterprise system, or security and privacy of a database. Additional aspects are often addressed by a separate engineering activity. This separation of concerns has led to system engineering practices that are not designed to reflect, detect, or manage the interdependencies of such aspects, for example, the interplay between security and safety in modern car electronics, or between security, privacy, and reliability in connected medical devices. Current trends and innovation in ICT, however, suggest a convergence of disciplines and risk domains in order to deal effectively and predictively with such interdependencies. But due to the inherent complexity of such interdependencies and the dynamic operational environments, identification and mitigation of composite risks in systems remains a challenge. The environment that requires risk management and mitigation be a central and integral part of engineering methods for future ICT systems. To address the requirements of the modern computing environment, we need a new approach to risk, where risk modeling is included in design as its integral part. In this chapter, we identify some of the key challenges and issues that a vision of risk engineering brings to current engineering practice; notably, issues of risk composition, the multidisciplinary nature of risk, the design, development, and use of risk metrics, and the need for an extensible risk language. The chapter provides an initial view on the foundational mechanisms we need to build in order to support the vision of risk engineering: risk ontology, risk modeling and composition, and risk language.

Abstract

Information and communications technology (ICT) is a rapidly growing field. The incorporation of new cyber-physical system technologies into future smart city applications may have noticeable impacts on the environment, which may be either beneficial or harmful. This chapter discusses how cyber-physical systems (CPSs) impact the environment, the role of green CPS, relevant applications in this field, and how to further improve these systems aiming at a more environmentally friendly coexistence. Most energy today is generated by nonrenewable sources, which, to different extents, cannot ensure sustainability within societal development. It has been reported that ICT infrastructure and systems are critical energy consumers, as they consume about 2–5% of the world’s energy, which will keep increasing as cyber-physical-system-based technologies become more ubiquitous. It is clear that one of the key factors in reducing the negative impact of ICT on the environment is to reduce energy consumption. Since there are various techniques toward this objective, this chapter makes a survey on some relevant proposals. There have been a number of works oriented to power savings for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in cellular networks. There have been other works discussing how to reduce energy consumption under large-scale-equipment architectures, such as those installed by telecommunication operators. There has been also some work that describes the use of small, inexpensive, resource-constrained devices with pervasive computing capabilities to deploy an ubiquitous energy control system. Besides applications and technologies that reduce energy consumption, there are also cases where CPS directly improve the impact on the environment. Some of these cases include the monitoring of forests and plantation, the automation of vegetation care through an Internet of Things (IoT) network, and using IoT in green agricultural products supply chain management. In summary, better ICT technology designs can have a significant positive impact on the environment and they can achieve this in different ways, e.g., aiding the detection of pollutants or reducing energy consumption, which would result in more stable ecology systems.

Cyber Security Lessons not Learned from Previous ICT Innovation Cycles

ICT has gone through a number of innovation cycles since its start in World War II. New ICT developments are adopted by industry and society in a way which reflects the technology adaption lifecycle model coined by Bohlen and Beal (1957). Early adopters take up the innovations. After the breakthrough of an ICT innovation, a fast uptake by users and organizations can be recognized. Later on, a mainstream phase occurs in which the negative drawbacks of the new innovations have been overcome.

It was shown by Venkatesh et al. (2003) and Venkatesh and Bala (2008) that adopting ICT innovations largely relates to the ease of use and its usefulness to the end-users and their organizations; in short, user-friendly functionality. The cyber security aspects of ICT innovations do not play a role according to their findings. After the many ICT innovation cycles we have gone through, one could expect that cyber security requirements would have come more to the forefront, but that is obviously not the case. The main reason is that no cyber security lessons are learned from earlier ICT innovation cycles and that the same mistakes are repeated over and over again as the driving forces for ICT innovation come from outside security-aware communities.

In the 1960s, one could walk to a terminal and start typing a username and password to log-in. If the username was entered wrongly, a new user environment was created. The usernames and passwords were stored clearly on the system and the password file often was accessible to all users and system programs. Over time, the security of computer access was improved and the number of times one could try passwords for a certain username became limited. The manifold of security problems posed by buffer overflows and lack of input validation allowing hackers to elevate their access level to system resources were fixed in the operating systems of mainframes in the mid-seventies. However, each new operating system version contained the same type of design and coding errors in newly developed functionality and patching of those holes was required.

In the seventies, existing and new computer companies caused an ICT revolution by bringing mini computers and midi computers to department levels of organizations. As these systems were intended to be used in small cooperative environments, ease of use was their advantage point. One could walk up to the system, reboot the system and run ones’ programs without any computer security measure other than the physical access to the room. Multi-user use was added in a simplistic way as seen from a computer security aspect. For example, the original UNIX/etc/passwd file was world-readable. It showed the usernames, and their related one-way encrypted passwords and the random salt value. The one-way encryption process was supposed to provide strong system access security as the process was irreversible. The claim was right; however as the encryption process was public, hackers simply used brute force processing of all character permutations through the fast password algorithm and compared the outcome with the encrypted passwords in the password file. Out of the box thinking resulted in a simple way to reveal usernames and passwords. Moreover, Moore’s law caused an increase in processing speed each year and thus decreased the password strength and time needed to break username-password combinations.

Other operating systems at that time allowed the user to interrupt a program which had access to the password file and created a memory dump containing all passwords in plain text.

Moreover, similar to earlier mainframes, the operating systems in minis and midis were not secured against hackers as bad coding practices were used, e.g., buffer overflows and lack of input validation. Providing new functionality in the operating system had priority over security.

Apple launched its Apple II in 1977. IBM followed with the Personal Computer (PC) in 1981. The initial disk operating systems did not provide any security other than a read-only bit to protect against the accidental overwriting of a file. It was personal computers after all.

Networking of PCs onwards from 1983, e.g., with Novell and LAN Manager, required more security to be added in hindsight to the PC. The increase in malware such as viruses and worms required additional security measures to be added to the PC platform—which was not intended to be secure at all—and its subsequent Windows operating systems. Major failures in computer security were found in simple access to the memory of system and other applications, disk scavenging, clear text passwords on the network, and too simple implementations of security measures that dealt with legacy protocols. An example was the legacy support for LAN Manager in Windows/NT where one easily could determine the length of a users’ password. In a similar manner, the protection of the Windows/NT password file and file system was based on internal system protection, it failed when hackers out of the box used of a Unix-based bootable floppy disk and application to access the system device.

It took until after the millennium before manufacturers like Microsoft started to take the security of their server operating systems serious. At the same time, design failures occurred in the encryption processes of wireless networking technology. The push to the world-wide market and of the new functionality was more important than proper cyber security. In a fast sequence, the wireless encryption protocol WEP was shown to be insecure causing the need for their replacement which was broken soon thereafter. Why did the system designers and programmers not learn from the lessons identified with earlier security failures? Why did they only look for functionality?

In parallel, ICT found its way in the automation of physical and real-world processes such as in the chemical industry, switching of rail points, and the control of the power, gas and water grids. The Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) and similar process control protocols were designed without many security considerations. The software was proprietary and no one else was interested in its detailed working. The process control networks were closed, therefore no hackers would have access. The same manufacturer root password which one could not change was embedded in thousands of units all over the world. The Stuxnet case was a case in making use of such a design and deployment error (Falliere et al., 2010).

The design, implementations of SCADA protocols and the protection of systems in the field did not keep pace with the security considerations ahead of their field. Connectivity with public networks, ease of teleworking, and tools like Shodan which identify vulnerable process control systems connected to the internet create the access paths for cyber criminals to critical infrastructures such as our energy grids (Averill and Luiijf, 2010).

Only some years ago, testing a SCADA network with the ICT-network tool Nmap at a large inhomogeneous SCADA installation caused one-third of the SCADA implementation to crash and another one-third to stop communication. The SCADA protocol implementations could not deal with an unexpected byte more or less in a received packet. It failed to validate the received protocol packets as the implementation expected a benign operating environment.

These are just some examples of ICT innovations and adaptation cycles where the system designers did not properly take security considerations into account and the programmers failed to learn from cyber security lessons identified in earlier ICT adaptation cycles. Failing to protect against buffer overflows, no input validation, not cleaning of sensitive information from re-usable memory buffers, and embedding system passwords are just some examples of errors—and thus disguised old threats—that occur over and over again with each ICT innovation cycle.

Moreover, new ICT-functionality itself provides unknown backdoors. For example, new versions of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) boards nowadays may contain an embedded web engines. Often such new PLC boards replace old defective PLC boards. The new functionality, however, allows access to all PLC functions unless someone takes the time to lock the web interface entry.

More examples of these and other threats to process control systems can be found in Luiijf (2010).

2.1.5 Smart governance

ICT plays a primary role in the governance of smart cities in order to create value for society [9]. Until the late 1990s, governance was viewed by international organization as form of political regime [10]. Nevertheless, this classical view is starting to be challenged and in some instances vanish as information systems are taking a big role in our daily lives and that of the cities infrastructures. It was suggested that governance practices be revisited by focusing on the following five pillars [11]:

openness

participation

accountability

effectiveness

coherence

In order to effectively implement these five concepts, it is primordial to rely on modern information systems for communicating with the city residents. The role of ICT in smart city governance is illustrated in Fig. 1.2.

Fig. 1.2 shows a framework that relies on ICT to create value for the society. It is codenamed “The smart city house” [9]. This model relies on a foundation that is composed of two parts: data and networking as the basis for the smart city endeavor on top of which sits three pillars whose role is to enable good governance, transform social organization, and inform or guide residents in their day-to-day choices. This foundation then enables smart and efficient services such as sustainable energy, fair employment, and better quality of life overall.

Smart governance further encloses better city planning, emergency management, budgeting, and forecasting based on real time data describing needs as well as changing priorities. In addition, it also relies on strategic orientation and better healthcare that reduces the impact of aging populations. At last, it ensures the aggregation and monitoring of energy production and consumption data in order to provide better management policies [9].

1 Introduction

Information and communications technology (ICT) is an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application encompassing mobile phones, computer and network hardware, software, the Internet, satellite systems, and so on. ICT also refers to the various services and applications associated with them, such as videoconferencing and distance learning.

Police organizations within Australia, like other police organizations throughout the world, are dependent on ICT to operate. This need grows as ICT develops.

Poor ICT systems prevent police officers from getting on with their jobs. A better ICT system will raise police productivity so that the same amount of work could be done by fewer officers, or more work could be done by the current number of officers.

Over the years, technological innovations such as the telephone, mobile radio, and tape recorder have been introduced into policing to improve effectiveness. They have had a major influence on how police organizations function and how police do their work (Choo, 2011; Ready and Young, 2015; Tanner and Meyer, 2015; Koper et al., 2015).

When it was introduced into policing over three decades ago, mainframe computer technology also had a profound influence on how police agencies functioned, although it was not well recognized at the time. It allowed the collection, storage, and retrieval of large amounts of data and, as a consequence, police information systems became a reality. However, numerous forms had to be designed to capture the data, and officers were required to report the data by completing the forms. Then people had to be hired to code and feed the data into the computers, while others were made responsible for retrieving and distributing data in different combinations to still others who analyzed the results. In essence, mainframe computer technology created more employment, bureaucracy, and, for the police officer, more paperwork.

Now client/server computer technology has replaced or enhanced mainframe functions and has revolutionized some basic organizational functions and paper systems. Ordering of police supplies, payment of bills and salaries, and keeping of inventory can all be done electronically through much shorter and faster processes executed by fewer people. For example, operational police can take laptop computers into their patrol cars and into investigative interviews to collect data directly. Internal electronic mail systems and the Internet are also giving police access to unlimited information to help them perform their jobs more efficiently. Internal information systems are also more accessible to the police officer. Some police training can also be automated and pursued individually at times convenient to the officer and the organization, thus reducing training costs and eliminating the difficulty of taking a number of officers out of the field at the same time. The trend in information technology during that period has had an appreciable impact on police work. Police agencies are even exploring the integration of all justice information systems to allow justice practitioners and agencies to electronically access and share information between systems and/or across jurisdictional lines. Some agencies have already partially implemented this into their system. Police-related websites and list servs are also enabling officers to consult and share information with colleagues all over the world via the Internet.

However, the phablet, a new network computer technology linked to telecommunications systems, has even more potential to transform police work. The phablet has evolved, too, as smartphones stretched in size to compete for the convenience and capability of tablets. Phablets have screens that measure diagonally 135–178 mm (5.3–6.99 in.), a size that complements screen-intensive activity such as mobile web browsing and multimedia viewing. Phablets may also include software optimized for an integral self-storing stylus to facilitate sketching and annotation. It was perhaps these character traits, the screen size and stylus that distinguished itself with policing?

While Samsung's Galaxy Note is largely credited with pioneering the worldwide phablet market when launched in 2011, examples of early devices with similar form factors date to 1993. By the time the Galaxy Note 3 came to market, policing agencies such as the Australian Federal Police were already conceptualizing how a policing organization's capabilities could be delivered from the IT backend to the frontline officer, thanks in part to the benefits of phablet usage. Will the phablet become the dominant computing device for police of the future?

ICT has an important role to play in the success of criminal investigations, but police competence and management are also important. For ICT to play a significant role it must be adopted, not adapted, into police work as part of a solid base alongside management, competent police officers, and well-organized investigations.