Over the past decade or two, the progress in information technology (IT) has completely transformed our world - including the practice and possibilities of scientific research. This profound transformative process is not over, and there is a healthy, growing synergy between the computationally-enabled science and science-driven computing. IT has produced an exponential growth of information volume and complexity, but we are still learning how to extract efficiently the knowledge and understanding which is enabled by this growth. This challenge is common to all fields of science today, as well as many other areas of human endeavor. In astronomy, the framework for harnessing the progress in IT for the benefit of our science is provided by the Virtual Observatory concept, which is still in the early stages of development, and is still much misunderstood by a majority of astronomers. The new, IT-intensive science should be not just quantitatively different (same problems and same approaches but with more data), but may lead to some qualitatively different ways of exploring the universe. I will illustrate some of these issues both with historical examples, and examples from the new Palomar-Quest sky survey.