Chapter 2

Information Technologies: Concepts and Architecture

Chapter 2 is dedicated to the various species of information systems. The major categories of systems are those intended to support the functional areas, business transaction processing, and management of the organization. The chapter also outlines the architecture and infrastructure of information technology.

[ Update | Exercises

Update

Bumping up against the Year 2000

T he day is fast approaching when millions of lines of computer code will suddenly become obsolete--or worse, become an unpredictable menace to any computer system that relies on the accurate calculation of dates to perform its task. Many organizations are frantically trying to come up with a cure for the Millennial Bug--a curious phenomenon that occurs primarily in legacy systems where dates have been stored traditionally using just two digits to represent a year (e.g., '96' instead of '1996').

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, parsimonious programmers concentrated on minimizing the storage requirements of programs that they developed. One way to do this was to shave a couple of bytes off every date by ignoring the current century. It seems inconsequential by today's standards, but back then storage was very expensive, and a couple of bytes times thousands or even millions of date occurances in a database could save more than a few bucks. What about the millenium? Well, that was decades away. Chances were that the programs would not longer be in use (or at least, the programmer would have retired to South Florida). But the fact is that many of these programs are still in use--either as stand-alone systems or as modules within larger, more current systems.

Back to the present: with little more than three years to go, companies are scrambling to update their systems to handle multiple centuries. In some cases, this requires a massive reengineerinng effort; in others, it's a matter of ferreting out the offending code which may be buried within sub-routines of sub-routines. For more information about millenial information management, follow the links below:

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Exercises

  1. Enter the site of Panhandle Eastern Corp. and find the profit the company made during the last 5 years.
  2. Surf the Internet to find information about airport security via bomb detecting devices (Box 2.5).
  3. Write a short report about ordering pizzas via the Internet. (Check the Web sites of Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut.)
  4. Find information about Porter’s value chain. Write a short report on how IT is enhancing added value.

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