Page 85 - DMGT505_MANAGEMENT_INFORMATION_SYSTEM

Management Information Systems

Notes mainframes, servers, PCs, mobile phones, and other handheld devices, and connect to public
infrastructures such as the telephone system, the Internet, and public network services.
The enterprise infrastructure employs software that can link disparate applications and enable
data to flow freely among different parts of the business. Other solutions for enterprise integration
include enterprise application integration software, Web services, and outsourcing to external
vendors that provide hardware and software for a comprehensive enterprise infrastructure.
The enterprise era promises to bring about a truly integrated computing and IT services platform
for the management of global enterprises. The hope is to deliver critical business information
painlessly and seamlessly to decision makers when and where they need it to create customer
value. This could be everything from getting inventory data to the mobile salesperson in the
customer’s office, to helping a customer at a call center with a problem customer, or providing
managers with precise up-to-the-minute information on company performance.
That is the promise, but the reality is wrenchingly difficult and awesomely expensive. Most
large firms have a huge, tangled web of hardware systems and software applications inherited
from the past. This makes achieving this level of enterprise integration a difficult, long-term
process that can last perhaps as long as a decade and cost large companies hundreds of millions
of dollars. Table 5.1 compares each era on the infrastructure dimensions discussed above.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
3. The five eras of IT infrastructure are ............................... special-purpose machines, general-
purpose mainframe and minicomputer computing, personal computers, client/server
networks, and enterprise and Internet computing.

4. The ............................... era was a period of highly centralized computing under the control
of professional programmers and systems operators.

5.3 Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the
number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled
approximately every two years. Rather than being a naturally-occurring “law” that cannot be
controlled, however, Moore’s Law is effectively a business practice in which the advancement of
transistor counts occurs at a fixed rate.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s law: processing
speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All
of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased
the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore’s law
precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early
21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop
until 2015 or even later.

Task Discuss client/server era of evolution of IT infrastructure.

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