Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Ten years ago, when tackling stories on IT, journalists would almost invariably see the task as 'getting to the bottom of the technology' - the bits and bytes, the features and functions, and the personalities and companies that developed them.

Reports about the 1995 launch of Internet Explorer 1.0, for example, centred on its technical merits - or lack of them - compared to Netscape (the then 90% market share leader). Pieces about Oracle's new applications suite were largely features-and-functions reviews, maybe with some caustic comments from rivals included in the interests of 'balance'.

But over the decade - and particularly during the last three years - the action has moved on. The real excitement, the captivating business stories of human endeavour are not in the labs of computer companies or even on the competitive battlegrounds; they are not the tales of technology or those that develop and sell it but the stories of those that buy it and apply it.

The fundamental difference is that over the decade IT has come out of the backroom and into the business. That may sound trite, but despite the trauma of ERP implementations, Y2K and the dot-com boom and bust, IT has progressively extended deep into the fabric of the organisation, to the point where most business processes could barely function without it. The upshot, as British Airways' Paul Coby highlights in our feature about how the lives of CIOs have changed during the decade, is that IT is increasingly in the enviable role of being able to see right across the business - of understanding how the business works, how its processes fit together and (hopefully) how they can be improved.

In that way, many IT departments are beginning to fulfil their promise as the 'agents of change'. They have the visibility to see where new approaches might enhance the business and they have the tools to execute that change.

Not everyone is in that position yet, but the numerous stories in this month's issue - both in our sketch of the industry during the magazine's first decade and in the profiles of the winners of our annual Effective IT Awards - show that rather than IT organisations losing their ability to demonstrate value to the business, they are finding themselves consistently in the position of defining and initiating change. And that makes for a very different IT story from the one you might have read back in 1995.

Editor: Kenny MacIver