This is my last column for IT Week as me and the monkeys are off to pursue some more interesting, erm, pursuits. Incredibly, it has been nine years since I started writing about IT ­ by mistake. To be honest, it seems longer.

I was full of beans, and apparently in possession of a full head of hair, when I started working for IT Week. Having come from a job at the BBC where email and internet users were few and far between, I can still remember the excitement I felt settling into an office that was wired and ready to cruise the information superhighway. I remember the thrill I got on first seeing a Handspring PDA, and I can remember who it was that downloaded the Iloveyou virus, and in so doing ensured the whole office got the rest of the day off. We were writing about virus attacks, and suffering from them as well. It was like being in the front line of a dreadfully geeky war.

While here, I have weathered the Y2K storm, and followed the Information Commissioner’s Office as it tried to work out under what circumstances businesses should be allowed to spy on their staff ­ something that took a very long time indeed. And surely I can’t be the only person in the country that really, really, really wanted to trade my MiniDisc player in for a 64MB MP3 player.

None of these experiences did much for my social life, though. For my colleagues and, hopefully, IT Week’s target audience, developments around the Millennium Bug and data privacy were intensely interesting, but mention them in a club or bar, and people would look at you as if you’d just sneezed into their Singapore Sling.

Many of my columns over the years seem to have elicited similar reactions from certain readers, judging from a pile of letters that I uncovered when I started to clear my desk.

Most of this feedback ­ well, a complaint is a form of feedback, isn’t it? ­ concerned the rare occasions when my articles might have strayed a little from the subjects of enterprise systems and IT strategy. I take a certain pride, however, that no one else on the team can boast of letters from Celine Dion and Whitney Houston fans, or complaints from both librarians and transsexuals. Have you ever been called a “burnt-out pixel”, or had your comments about Microsoft and Yahoo described as “sleazy”? Well, I have. And I did it all for you.

I’ve just been in the IT Week storage facility to dig out some of my old words of wisdom. Sadly, there isn’t all that much wisdom there. At least not for the retrospective reader. In one I find myself recommending that the internet be made wireless and free ­ well, we are halfway there ­ and suggesting that people stop shopping on the high street and start buying online. Most pieces, however, just talk about monkeys.

Maybe there just isn’t much else to say. Do things really change that much?
What are we tackling in the workplace these days? Access to applications, data loss, PDAs and client software, content management, software licensing, skills and staff retention, outsourcing and services, new chips… nothing really changes that much, does it? It just gets easier to use, and harder to manage ­ depending, of course, on who you are listening to.

What I do think, as I prepare to leave IT Week, is that the end user can now enjoy the best of both worlds. Their worlds of work and leisure are colliding in a very positive way. The blurring of the line between consumer and business technology is bringing a number of management challenges, but, if handled properly, it should also make for a much more productive workforce as people find new creative ways to use familiar tools to reach their goals.

And that can’t be bad, can it?