The impact of ICT on an adult in full-time employment and the effects on his/her working style

numbers etc. for schools, local council offices and other services as well as government regulations and policies.  It also has message boards which can only be used by employees all though it is used as a buying and selling forum.  There are a lot of restrictions on the network as well in the form that everyone has there own password for every piece of software that they use and they are restricted to the areas that they work in, an example of this is if he tried to get into an area that contained information about people enquiring about fostering and/or adoption then he would be denied this which also brings us onto the area of the Data Protection Act which is one of his big worries as he has to keep all his passwords secret in case somebody got hold of them, he also has to password protect every e-mail that is sent.  Although he works in finance he does not have access to credit details or handle actual payments, he only works this out and these other details (the collection or paying out of money) is handled by the treasurers.  He regularly uses a phone that is connected to a main switchboard and every employee bar the cleaners have there own telephone number which is a four digit code and this allows swift contact between employers.  As with every other company the councils has to adhere to the Health and Safety at Work Act and as most people suffer with computer related injuries the council has its own department in most buildings to help with this and this graduate has tendonitis in his wrist so he has to have a special cordless mouse which involves all the roller-ball movement being done by his hand, although people who suffer to the extremities have been known to be given voice-recognition software and with this every employee is given flat-screen monitors and anti-glare screen.  They also have there own computer engineer called J.I.T.T.U and they maintain all the computers in the building and also have remote control software to fix minor problems on computers without having to move from their desk’s.  The 2 financial software packages that he use’s are equally important to the councils financial system and consist of an old and a new system, the first and oldest is C.I.S.S and this was specially developed for the council and has been used in the council for a long time, the next is a German system called SAP which has only been installed for 3 months and this was derived from a program made for businesses but has been adapted to suit the councils needs, all the people who use this went training weekends but they are still having problems.  Along with all the usual office hardware like scanners, photocopiers and   fax machines there is also video conferencing software, which allows the directors to have meetings with each other without actually meeting.   Home At home he uses a P.c with a 566mhz processor, 64mb RAM, a cd-rw and a 1mb video card, which is used to download mpeg’s and mp3’s, used as a word processor and to play low-level graphic games.  He also has an mp3 player which he brought when mp3 players where relatively new and expensive so 64mb was a lot of songs when they first started.  He has a Playstation 2 game console with an eye toy which allows the user to appear in the games and control it with their body movement and it can also be used as a webcam for sending video messages. Unit 3b shows that somebody who grew up when computers where just developing (1970’s and 80’s) can still be computer literate when they are in a full-time job and this gives him valuable experience against the older generation who are not so experienced. Simon Oldfield