What Do We Really Need to Know About Technology?

• Author: SANDERS, ROBERT L.

Information technology (IT) is growing at a dizzying rate. In 1953 there were about 100 computers in the world. In the third quarter of 1998, 22.6 million computers were shipped worldwide. There will be an estimated 580 computers per thousand people in the United States by the year 2000, up from 92 per thousand in 1985. International Data Corporation estimates that by 2005, the Internet will connect 1 billion users (Saffady 1998). This growth in computing has changed our lives substantially.

In business offices, growth has been a succession of tumultuous changes. Even more disorienting than the speed of growth and the succession of new systems we encounter are the startling innovations and drastic, unpredictable shifts in technology's direction. Consequently for information managers, staying abreast of the technology that affects our work is daunting. Often we are in a quandary as to how valuable a particular feature might be.

The vulnerability of IT to rapid obsolescence is disconcerting. For example, most of us have come to accept the strategy of storing scanned images on optical disks in a jukebox. Recently I saw an ad for a name-brand server, priced under $30,000, that stores a terabyte of data online. Was it a mistake to spend $20,000 last year for a jukebox that stores only 40 gigabytes -- especially when images stored on the server can be retrieved a hundred times faster than from the jukebox? If the capacity of server hard disks has expanded so rapidly during the past year, how much more may we expect in future years. Is our new jukebox destined for the same equipment salvage auction as the eight-track tape player?

Another example is client-server technology. In this configuration, the server relinquishes some data manipulation tasks to a client PC on which the application has been installed. Just as I was becoming comfortable with specifying client/server as a system requirement, an IT analyst pointed out that the ascendancy of Internet technology implies a return to the server performing all data manipulation similar to the mainframes of the 1970s, while PC browsers play the role of dumb terminals. A synthesis of these two approaches has appeared: Java applets for Web browsers, wherein the browser downloads abbreviated versions of applications, somewhat like clients in a client-server configuration. An added advantage of this synthesis is that it does not need to be manually installed on each browser because the applet can be downloaded from the server.

A final example involves adding an organizationwide imaging system to an already burdened corporate network. The solution had been to maintain the document index on a central database accessible to all, but keep the corresponding images on local jukeboxes in the offices that scan and most frequently access them. This approach makes the index instantly available to everyone and also makes it possible to...