MIS-CH05: IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies

Editor's Notes

• #3: Are students familiar with any of the trends in hardware or software platforms? Do they see the iPhone/iPad for instance as a device, a computing platform, or a just a telephone? They might be familiar with developments such as Facebook’s Application platform, where developers can design games and activities for use within Facebook itself. Also recall that cloud computing has been mentioned in earlier chapters, so students should be able to point to that as a contemporary hardware platform trend.
• #5: The “service platform” perspective refers to analyzing the actual services enabled by new technology tools. For example, a new PC might save an employee one hour per day in wait time for information, dramatically increasing his or her value to the firm.
• #6: The point of this slide is to illustrate the centrality of IT infrastructure and services to the achievement of firm success. Ultimately, what the firm delivers to customers, its quality, is a direct function of the power of its infrastructure. For instance, Amazon is routinely sited as the most popular online shopping site and receives high praise from customers for the quality of its service and speed of execution. There is a reason for this: Amazon has one of the world’s largest computing infrastructures numbering several hundred thousand processors to provide these services.
• #7: Students may be unfamiliar with the concept of mainframe computers. Explain the difference in size (much larger) and computing capacity (much smaller) from today’s computers to give them a sense of perspective regarding how far the computing industry has gone in 60 years. However, modern-day mainframes (IBM z-Series), are extremely powerful servers used for large Fortune 1000 enterprise networks and corporate Web sites. The mainframe is not dead in other words and still represents a large revenue stream for IBM.
• #8: Examples of the use of cloud computing are Google Apps, Google’s suite of software applications that rivals Microsoft’s Office applications at a fraction of the cost, and Salesforce.com’s CRM management software, delivered over the Internet. Most large Fortune 500 firms have some applications that run in the cloud. Most of these same corporations do not put their strategic or critical systems on the cloud just yet because of lingering concerns about reliability and security.
• #9: This slide shows the portion of Figure 5-2 that illustrates the first three eras of IT infrastructure evolution discussed in the previous slide. Explain so students understand that the yellow ring connecting the machines in the client-server graphic represents a local area network. Personal computers were stand-alone systems prior to the development of local area networks.
• #10: This slide shows the portion of Figure 5-2 that illustrates the last two eras of IT infrastructure evolution discussed in the previous slide. The enterprise Internet graphic represents several individual networks linked together into an enterprise-wide network. The cloud computing graph represents several types of technology that are capable of connecting to the Internet and accessing applications and services through a cloud. There is a Learning Track on the stages of IT infrastructure evolution.
• #11: Explain that the distribution of computing power across smaller, less expensive machines enabled by client/server computing is in part responsible for the drastic increase in computing power and applications throughout the firm. Prior to small, less expensive server computers, computing power had to purchased in large blocks at great expense. With client/server computing, you can grow your firm’s inventory of computers gradually, over time, to meet current demand.
• #12: Variants of Moore’s Law include: the number of transistors on a chip doubles ever 18 months; computing power doubles every 18 months; and the price of computing falls by half every 18 months. Explain to students that even now, this trend is likely to continue, with transistors reaching the sizes of viruses, the smallest form of life.
• #13: At what point, if any, do students believe that the doubling trend of Moore’s Law might come to an end? Ask them to speculate and give reasons for their answers.
• #14: What do students think the implications of such drastically reduced costs of computer chips might be in the future? Explain the connection to concepts such as the digital divide and cloud computing.
• #15: Nanotechnology is used to create transistors of the tiny size previously mentioned. Can students describe any other applications of this type of technology (for example, medical)?
• #16: Explain the importance of the exponential growth in hard drive capacity, which is that the world is producing an increasing amount of digital information requiring storage each year as well. Fortunately, the cost of storing that information is decreasing at an even quicker rate. Explain that this figure displays the number of kilobytes of data that can be stored with one dollar. Point out that the Y-axis is greatly compressed to display the doubling effect, and that if it weren’t, the increase from year to year would become increasingly enormous.
• #17: Ask students to explain the implications of Metcalfe’s law to social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Do they agree that the more members are using the site, the value of being a member and the usefulness of the site grows? Do people make “new friends” on a social site or hang out with their existing friends mostly?
• #18: Are students aware of any friends or family that do not have Internet access? You might ask them to remember “life before the Internet”, if possible, to underscore the magnitude of how far communication and computing has come over time. You might ask students to guess how fast (slow) were the telephone modems used by most Internet users in 1990s. Fifty-six kbps was the fastest telephone modem which is about 1/20th of a megabit per second. Most cable Internet to the home today is running at 2 to 4 mbps, forty to fifty times faster than telephone modems.
• #19: Emphasize to students how close the communication cost per kilobit has come to an infinitesimal number (nearly 0) since 1995. What implications does this have for the number of people using the Internet? You could once again relate this to the digital divide and emphasize that even now a significant portion of the world lacks access to the Internet and other services, though it has more to do with reasons of insufficient infrastructure than Internet communication costs. One implication: it costs no more to move a gigabyte from New York to San Francisco than it does to move the same amount of information from the top of a building to the basement. This means that data no longer needs to be located “close by” the user.
• #20: What might today’s enterprise infrastructure and Internet have been like without widespread and universal standards, such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Unix, and Ethernet? (Greatly decreased efficiency and confusion, inability to develop innovative products everyone can use based on a single standard, etc.)
• #21: The upcoming slides will go over each component in more detail.
• #22: Ask students to take a look at the example companies that appear under each heading. What companies appear repeatedly? How many items are unfamiliar?
• #23: To give students an idea of the size of the market for computer hardware, in 2014, firms worldwide will spend $669 billion on computer hardware, from mainframes to tablets and smartphones.
• #24: Emphasize Microsoft’s traditional dominance in operating systems and explain that it is the most important reason for their success to date. The market for enterprise software applications is approximately $250 billion dollars. These applications are considered to be part of IT infrastructure. Traditionally, large firms were the most prominent users of enterprise software, but firms such as Microsoft are trying to move into the untapped market of small- and medium-size businesses that might benefit from less expansive versions of the same software. Today, the proliferation of operating systems for smartphones and tablet computers (mostly iOS and Android) are mounting a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance which depends heavily on the continued existence of personal computers.
• #25: Remind students that the amount of new information in the world is doubling every three years, driving the need for more efficient data management and storage.
• #26: Companies worldwide are expected to spend $1.65 trillion for telecommunications services in 2014.
• #27: Internet platforms are yet another area where Microsoft is featured prominently. Students at this point should be able to appreciate the sheer size of the company. The trend since the late 1990s has been to reduce the number of servers by increasing their size and power. Dell, HP/Compaq, and IBM have been the beneficiaries of this trend. Multi-core processors and blade servers are two ways in which server power can be radically increased without increasing the footprint or the power requirements.
• #28: Implementing new infrastructure requires significant changes in business processes and procedures, training and education, and software integration. This is a task that firms struggle to achieve on their own, which drives the need for these services. The MIS course provides students with an excellent background to be a business systems consultant. Most business consulting today involves developing business processes and supporting systems. You might visit a job/career site in class to review the kinds of jobs available to students with IS or MIS majors. One recent report (2010) found that MIS majors were the most satisfied group of college graduates because their education led directly to a job! The survey, which was conducted by PayScale.com and reported in the Wall Street Journal October 12, 2010, found 54 percent of MIS majors were very satisfied with their majors. Psychology majors at 26 percent were the least satisfied.
• #29: Business computing is increasingly moving from PCs and desktops to mobile devices, and managers are increasingly using these to coordinate work and communicate with employees. Students may think the smartphone they own is just a phone, or music player, but for businesses it is becoming an important management tool. Ask students for examples of how they are using smartphones in their business or work.
• #31: In the past, IT departments in large firms dictated to their employees what kinds of devices they could use, both on site and off site while traveling. Increasingly, employees are telling the IT department what tools they want to use, and demanding that IT support these tools.
• #32: Quantum computing is in its infancy but has the potential to revolutionize computing speeds and power. Virtualization allows organizations to optimize their use of resources in new ways, and also to take advantage of spare computing power by allowing a single resource to act as multiple resources.
• #33: Explain that on-demand or utility computing describes a payment structure in which use is dependent upon actual time or power used. Cloud computing refers to a platform—networked access to remote services. Cloud computing allows organizations to avoid the expenses of maintaining their own hardware and software, relying on the cloud instead. Ask students if they have used Google Apps or other forms of cloud computing. Are there any other concerns they might have over transferring computing resources to a shared “cloud”? Have they read about Amazon Web Services going down and offline for short periods of time?
• #36: Data centers will use approximately 2% of all U.S. electrical power. Cutting power consumption in data centers has become both a serious business and environmental challenge. Ask students what forms of green computing they have noticed. Answers may range from more publicized local management of electronic equipment disposal and recycling to the use of solar chargers, and so on. Another driver in minimizing the power consumption of computer processors is the proliferation of handheld devices; to reduce heat in the devices as well as lengthen time between battery charges.
• #37: Linux plays a major role in the administration of local area networks. Around 20% of the server operating system market is owned by Linux. Ask students to give reasons why an open-source operating system might be a better choice for network administrators than alternatives that are not open-source (such as Microsoft’s Windows server).
• #38: Java is designed to run on any computing device by use of the Java Virtual Machine. This includes mobile devices such as smartphones. HTML is a markup/formatting tool that creates Web pages that all browsers can interpret and display regardless of the type or manufacture of the computer being used.
• #39: Firms are collections of thousands of computer programs and systems built over many years. In general, these systems cannot “talk” with one another, and sharing information among them is very expensive. One way to get to work together is to build software links among them. This is the Web services approach (see the next slide on service-oriented architecture). You can compare it to the Web: any computer with a browser can access billions of Web pages and draw down the information, or download PDF files that work on all computers that have a version of Adobe acrobat installed. In a business firm, you want a similar environment: any computer program can get data from any other computer program. Web services makes this possible. Ensure that students are able to explain the difference between XML and HTML (in other words, the additional features XML has compared to HTML). These include classifying, presenting, communicating, and storing data, as opposed to HTML being able to merely present data. These features also allow computers to manipulate documents written in XML automatically. Does this remind students of autonomic computing?
• #40: Emphasize that SOA is a method of developing infrastructure using Web services with an eye toward creating applications that draw data from several underlying (usually older “legacy” programs). All programs are built or redesigned to provide certain information (services) to all other programs. With SOA, developers incorporate each individual service into an application that successfully meets the needs of the organization.
• #41: Emphasize that the task Dollar wants to complete (interacting with other companies’ information systems) is represented here as a collection of individual services, in keeping with the SOA model. Dollar wants to be able to quickly and easily share data with other companies—the series of services provided above are combined to accomplish that task.
• #42: This slide discusses the trend in software outsourcing and in cloud software services. Remind students that internal sources for software refers to developing software fully in house. Most companies today purchase or lease software or outsource development. Why do students think that software outsourcing is growing quickly in popularity? How about offshore outsourcing (mostly to India and other English-speaking, developing countries)? Ask students what types of software they have used online. Note that service level agreements are formal contracts between customers and their service providers that define the specific responsibilities of the service provider and the service expected by the customer. These are important to establish communication between the two firms and to manage the project efficiently.
• #43: Note the recent jump in SaaS spending within the last several years, and the pronounced rise in the last two or three years. What are the positives and negatives of acquiring software through the SaaS model? Positives: allows companies to focus on business issues rather than technology; for many companies, SaaS could cut costs. Negatives: SaaS increases the firm’s dependency on external suppliers. What happens if your supplier of SaaS services goes into bankruptcy? What is your backup plan?
• #44: In addition to the large enterprise software packages and services, some business tasks can be enabled through smaller programs or components that are combined to create a new function. The open-source movement, and the universal standards of Internet technologies, have created an environment in which software components can be created, used, and shared easily. Ask students which mashups and apps they have used. Have any students created any mashups or apps?
• #45: How can IT be flexible and still make long-term investments in hardware and software? SaaS may solve some problems, but ask students to envision some of the pitfalls of working with an external hardware or software vendor such as Google or Salesforce.com. What are some nightmare scenarios that companies must guard against? For instance, the vendor fails to make critical applications available when needed, poor customer service, and so on, or the vendor fails to upgrade equipment in order to save investment monies.
• #46: What are the ramifications of poor IT governance at a firm? For example, if a company does not clearly define what departments have the responsibility to make their own IT decisions, what could be the consequences? Some potential consequences are data mismanagement, poor communication, and slower response times to crises.
• #47: What types of companies should opt to rent as opposed to buy software? Possibly, companies with seasonal employees or semi-annual workloads. What differences between the two can students point to? TCO is a way of quantifying some of the hidden costs of hardware. Ask students to make the connection between the TCO of handling software and hardware infrastructure internally as opposed to acquiring it from an outside vendor. Is this an additional incentive to outsource?
• #48: How important of an impact do competitors’ services and investments affect a firm’s IT services and infrastructure? Is it wise to rely on those factors alone to determine what kind of services your firm provides? For instance, your competitors may not be the industry’s best example of how to develop IT services. In fact, your entire industry might be technological laggards. In this case, it might be better to look at best practices in other industries which have a reputation for superior IT services and capabilities.
• #49: Ask students to explain how each item affects a firm’s IT services and infrastructure. Do they feel that any one of the six is especially important (or unimportant)? You can also use this diagram as a framework for understanding why some firms fail to develop a workable, powerful IT infrastructure.