The IT world: Past and present

The business landscape underwent significant changes during the past two decades due to advances in technology and the Internet. Advances in hardware and software automated a large portion of business processes. Databases, management systems, spreadsheets, all became an integral part of the everyday operations. Every organization, more or less, acquired a private data warehouse that would be used to manage its inventory and achieve a certain level of automated and safe operation.

Advances in communication were equally ground-breaking. The use of e-mails, instant messengers, online applications or mobiles became widespread leading to a revolution on how people collaborated within the organization boundaries or with the outer business environment. As information and communication have become ubiquitous, organizations have now the capability to act on a larger scale without geographic or market constraints and effectively address directly to a wider range of customers.

Along with these benefits, the introduction of new technologies brought also a number of unprecedented technological challenges undermining efficiency in modern business operations. The sophistication of computing hardware incurred high costs due to the constant need for uninterrupted operation, maintenance and updates by personnel of high expertise. Furthermore, much often the accumulation of volumes of data did not work hand-in-hand with the capability to process them. As a result decision making was gradually hindered by complex and usually manual processes of information retrieval and data processing.

While in the past decade, early adopters of new technologies gained a competitive advantage, the standardization of these practices transformed the way organizations should think about their processes and data. Clearly, the focus had to move onto two entirely new aspects: intelligence and optimization.

by Panos Toulis (Monday, 01 March 2010 14:52)