90s / 00s
Systems adopted: ERP.
Localization: ln house / Outsource.
Technology: General Purpose (eg PC) via Internet
In this period, the economy is driven by two main factors: instability and increased competition. Companies try to reposition themselves, finding other roles and other technologies. Firms may think they have a certain horizon with respect to their moves; while during economic development the resources were abundant and there was a guarantee of having them in subsequent years, thus having freedom of maneuver for strategic changes even in the short term, now it is necessary to better plan the use of resources for long periods. In particular for electronic and computer technologies, the instability of the modern world means that a winning product in a particular moment, it is not certain that it can last long on the market. This is true in the short term and, even more so, in the long term.
00s / 10s
We are still in the game!
10s / 20s
What will happen?
The first technology available is the mainframe (IBM S/3603 is among the first to enter the company). In the ITC sector, innovation is massive and there are many companies that are born, develop consistently, but disappear quickly, sometimes being absorbed (such as Netscape, famous for the browser of the same name, is now a division of AOL) sometimes not.
The structure of the information technology market dictates very strict rules for innovation.
With the spread of the first connections, terminals for remote access to a central computer (stellar topology) were born. Then the network developed by placing intermediate servers. Only later does it arrive Internet, an infrastructure that allows us to integrate a
multitude of different architectures (hierarchical, peer to peer4, client-server5, ring...). In Internet everything intermediate between two communicating terminals is hidden, the structures are defined after the network has been developed. It provides us with a frightening freedom: we no longer need a structure that allows us to bring order. Internet it is certainly a massive technology (in the English sense of the term, i.e. of large dimensions).
This historical excursus is important for understanding information systems and, in general, technologies, because:
- businesses, and organizations in general, are daughters of their own tradition and their experience makes the difference;
- socio-political conditions are a predominant environmental component;
- the evolution and the state of the art are also a function of the paths of the users.
We are witnessing more and more a co-evolution of the company's choices based on the evolution of its own clients.
As Klee depicts in his โAngelus Novusโ, โThe angel of innovation must have an eye to the pastโ, that is, we must look to the past to do new things.
The possible evolution of information systems
ERP systems, dominated by SAP and Oracle, were born in the 70s. They were made for companies that had different technologies and structures than the current ones, which were designed for an environment in which the market was stable.
It is therefore clear that there is a need to introduce innovation, but we are limited by some factors, the main one is the resistance to change by people who use the systems currently present, as change requires learning and the study of something new (which is not always well seen).
The operating systems in use today are mainly
- Unix (40 years)
- Windows (30 years)
- Linux (20 years)
These systems were born in an era in which information technology was done on small-medium sized computers. Over time, these same systems have spread to workstations and servers.
It is worrying that in today's world there are no more sophisticated systems than these existing: looking for example at the web, we can think of introducing a new operating system that supports tags for a single page of a document.
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