In a competitive world it is necessary for organizations to take advantage of every opportunity to reduce cost, improve quality, and provide service. Most organizations today recognize the need to be market driven, to be competitive, and to demonstrate added value.
A strategy being adopted by many organizations is to flatten the management hierarchy. With the elimination of layers of middle management, the remaining individuals must be empowered to make the strategy successful. Information to support rational decision making must be made available to these individuals. Information technology (IT) is an effective vehicle to support the implementation of this strategy; frequently it is not used effectively. The client/server model provides power to the desktop, with information available to support the decision-making process and enable decision-making authority.
The Gartner Group, a team of computer industry analysts, noted a widening chasm between user expectations and the ability of information systems (IS) organizations to fulfill them. The gap has been fueled by dramatic increases in end-user comfort with technology (mainly because of prevalent PC literacy); continuous cost declines in pivotal hardware technologies; escalation in highly publicized vendor promises; increasing time delays between vendor promised releases and product delivery (that is, "vaporware"); and emergence of the graphical user in terface (GUI) as the perceived solution to all computing problems.
In this book you will see that client/server computing is the technology capable of bridging this chasm. This technology, particularly when integrated into the normal business process, can take advantage of this new literacy, cost-effective technology, and GUI friendliness. In conjunction with a well-architected systems development environment (SDE), it is possible for client/server computing to use the technology of today and be positioned to take advantage of vendor promises as they become real.
The amount of change in computer processing-related technology since the introduction of the IBM PC is equivalent to all the change that occurred during the previous history of computer technology. We expect the amount of change in the next few years to be even more geometrically inclined. The increasing rate of change is primarily attributable to the coincidence of four events: a dramatic reduction in the cost of processing hardware, a significant increase in installed and available processing power, the introduction of widely adopted software standards, and the use of object-oriented development techniques. The complexity inherent in the pervasiveness of these changes has prevented most business and government organizations from taking full advantage of the potential to be more competitive through improved quality, increased service, reduced costs, and higher profits. Corporate IS organizations, with an experience based on previous technologies, are often less successful than user groups in putting the new technologies to good use.
Taking advantage of computer technology innovation is one of the most effective ways to achieve a competitive advantage and demonstrate value in the marketplace. Technology can be used to improve service by quickly obtaining the information necessary to make decisions and to act to resolve problems. Technology can also be used to reduce costs of repetitive processes and to improve quality through consistent application of those processes. The use of workstation technology implemented as part of the business process and integrated with an organization's existing assets provides a practical means to achieve competitive advantage and to demonstrate value.
Computer hardware continues its historical trend toward smaller, faster, and lower-cost systems. Competitive pressures force organizations to reengineer their business processes for cost and service efficiencies. Computer technology trends prove to leading organizations that the application of technology is the key to successful reengineering of business processes.
Unfortunately, we are not seeing corresponding improvements in systems development. Applications developed by inhouse computer professionals seem to get larger, run more slowly, and cost more to operate. Existing systems consume all available IS resources for maintenance and enhancements. As personal desktop environments lead users to greater familiarity with a GUI, corporate IS departments continue to ignore this technology. The ease of use and standard look and feel, provided by GUIs in personal productivity applications at the desktop, is creating an expectation in the user community. When this expectation is not met, IS departments are considered irrelevant by their users.
Beyond GUI, multimedia technologies are using workstation power to re-present information through the use of image, video, sound, and graphics. These representations relate directly to the human brain's ability to extract information from images far more effectively than from lists of facts.
Accessing information CAN be as easy as tapping an electrical power utility. What is required is the will among developers to build the skills to take advantage of the opportunity offered by client/server computing.
This book shows how organizations can continue to gain value from their existing technology investments while using the special capabilities that new technologies offer. The book demonstrates how to architect SDEs and create solutions that are solidly based on evolving technologies. New systems can be built to work effectively with today's capabilities and at the same time can be based on a technical architecture that will allow them to evolve and to take advantage of future technologies.
For the near future, client/server solutions will rely on existing minicomputer and mainframe technologies to support applications already in use, and also to provide shared access to enterprise data, connectivity, and security services. To use existing investments and new technologies effectively, we must understand how to integrate these into our new applications. Only the appropriate application of standards based technologies within a designed architecture will enable this to happen.
It will not happen by accident.
Patrick N. Smith with Steven L. Guengerich 