The birth of the "Noughties" was very much an IT event to be forever linked to the catastrophe that (thankfully) did not happen. The IT industry defends itself from accusations of scaremongering with the claim that all the hard work and money spent on upgrading and patching the hardware and software in time succeeded. Reality shows that the elevated investment, that might have been postponed otherwise, gave businesses better tools to work with at a time when the dot-com boom was taking off.
The bursting of that bubble left behind many sore investors but also the benefits of the start-ups that may not have made it without the hype of the early years. In many countries, the rush to lay fibre-optic cable to cope with the anticipation of colossal growth in internet is still being enjoyed ten years later through lower-cost consumer bandwidth. In Malta the benefits were modest, but so was the extent of investments gone sour.
The developments that took place in IT over the last decade are formidable and many business activities have changed significantly. Undoubtedly the strides in telecommunications are the most visible drivers. Mobile phone penetration in Malta rose to over 100 per cent, and it is safe to assume that there are very few in the working population who do not have a mobile phone. This has helped businesses with people on the move and is now combined with low-cost GPS, location and mapping applications.
Probably more significant in the business sector has been the ubiquity of e-mail that is now taken for granted. The ability to communicate without the need for all parties to give attention at the same time has reduced interruptions and increased the efficiency of informing or involving several people in a conversation. When different time zones are involved, we wonder how we coped before e-mail. The fax machine has followed the telex to near irrelevance.
The ability to transact online was available ten years ago but most success stories came from abroad. Today, in Malta, many thousands of e-commerce transactions take place each year. Online travel bookings have become significant and continue to grow. Online banking including bill payment facilities have come of age and reduced the paper handling as well as the bank queues. Similarly, e-government services are a great time-saver to businesses - reflected in the high levels of take-up of business services such as VAT returns.
The widespread use of broadband in business, up to 93 per cent all over the world, has transformed the ease of doing business internationally. The near-instant exchange of documents has simplified collaboration. Not only can we exchange messages but we can edit documents, site plans, spreadsheets and return them without any transcription. Software applications have also regaled us with facilities such as tracking changes in documents and the ability to work with colleagues or business partners sharing systems that are located in "the cloud", somewhere we don't know or care to know.
Orders are now commonly placed online going straight into the supplier's computer system. Ten years ago this was available only to a few large organisations at a significant cost. Order confirmation is instant along with a scheduled delivery. A change or addition a week later can be catered for with little disruption or effort.
Ten years ago, Open Source tools were expected to spell the demise of the giants in software but in the business world, the quality and variety of solutions whether desktop applications, back-end platforms, utilities or Linux flavours is not matched by take-up in the business sector in Malta due to the relatively limited availability of commercial implementers and support providers.
Websites were not new in the year 2000 but businesses today find much of the documentation and information needed on line, whether looking for product specifications, exchange rates, shipping services or Wi-Fi facilities in a hotel.
Open information has had an impact on competition. Customers find it easy to compare prices and in consumer goods such as electronics and appliances, some buyers are aware of the latest products before they are advertised.
Getting assistance or making an enquiry has changed dramatically in many business sectors. It used to involve a telephoning crusade or a week-long exchange of faxes and letters. In many business sectors today, business can obtain support through an e-mail or online self-help websites with FAQs and cheap VOIP calls.
The exponential growth of power and capacity in IT is no news but continues to make life easier in data centres. The expanding volume of e-mails, the more demanding software applications and the increasing use of multimedia online seem to be have rallied together to smother the ten years of progress delivered in data storage, processor power and bandwidth per euro.
The IT crew knows that software available today, in the e-mail server, the database engine, handling virtualisation, and elsewhere are luxuries only dreamed of in the year 2000. Many local businesses afford reporting and business intelligence tools that only a few could justify not so long ago.
Viruses and spam were a scourge that disrupted users, but today are fought at the server with stronger anti-virus weapons and anti-spam filters. The war is not won - only moved to the back room. As if looking for a new challenge, information security combatants face a new nightmare with social networks, Web 2.0, extranets, gigabytes on a keychain, e-mail on smartphones and similar advances punching gaping holes in the protective periphery.
No doubt, smarter counter measures and faster processors will come to the rescue over the next decade, along with new joys and toys that will make us wonder how we managed with such primitive technology back in the Noughties.
Mr Sammut is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers.