When we at LRS observe National IT Professionals Day on the third Tuesday of every September, we always think of three particular IT professionals.
Our company’s founders were three IT professionals in the days when information technology meant mainframes and punch cards. They banded together to form a company offering their expertise to clients who needed that special service.
In the 40-plus years since LRS was founded, IT has evolved and grown. In the 80s it began to include servers and personal computers and networks tying all the machines together. In the 90s it began to include a global network called the world wide web and with it a strange phenomenon called the website. And electronic mail.
In the 21st century, IT began to include mobile computing as cellular phones and tablets became more popular and much more powerful. Offsite storage rose in popularity to the point that many users store files and use applications that are stored in the “cloud.”
Along with the positive growth and evolution of Information Technology came the growth and power of criminals who commit their crimes over the internet, so IT now also includes cyber security.
That’s where we are today. Among the hundreds of LRS employees are programmers like our founders, along with quality assurance analysts, network engineers, web developers, cyber security analysts, cloud architects, and even mainframe specialists who tell us the mainframe is never going away.
These are the IT professionals who develop products for, and provide support to, our customers. They’re also the technology experts who provide crucial services that so many of our customers depend on to keep their businesses operating.
When most of us sit down at our desks to begin our workday, whether we’re in an office or at a remote location (such as a spare bedroom at home), we usually just fire up the computer and log into our email accounts without a thought to the IT behind the scenes and the IT professionals who keep it all running.
That’s why it’s important to set aside one day a year to honor these people. For most of the year, they toil at jobs that most users never think about, so we rarely thank or even acknowledge them for their work. One day a year really isn’t enough, but today we focus on celebrating them and the work they do.
And, as we’ve progressed from mainframes and punch cards to laptops and smartphones, we also recognize IT professionals for the work they do to keep up with the constant evolution of their world. We know they’re often studying to learn the latest changes in programming languages, operating systems, and security standards because LRS employs IT professionals whose job is to teach other IT professionals. And we know how busy our instructors are.
So this year, as always, we paused on National IT Professionals Day to recognize, celebrate, and thank all the IT professionals who make today’s world possible. We specifically call out every IT professional who has helped make Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. the company that it is today.
As you sift through the week’s emails and deal with Zoom or Teams calls, you should do the same. Acknowledge and thank the IT professionals who make it all possible.