Systems; Infotech : Leading our Digital future

TRIMILLENNIUM MANAGEMENT : INFOTECH
Leading our Digital future

By Bharat Bhaskar

The advances in managing large volumes of data in the 1980s, the development of transparent mechanisms for interconnections, and the emergence of global connectivity based on TCP/IP standards have provided us an opportunity to manipulate and disseminate information spread across geographic areas and propelled us into a new economic era. This New Economy-also called the Digital Economy-which is driven by the Net promises to be the engine of growth for at least the first quarter of this century. Only corporations as well as nations that are going to adjust to this reality are poised to be winners in the future.

The future of cyberspace will be shaped by 3 factors: advances in hardware; the growth of data which will lead to more complex storage-, retrieval-, and access-techniques; and the Net's reach and ease of access which will make more and more data available on-line.

The growth in the speed and the architecture of computer platforms will continue to drive prices downward. Developments in CPU-technology, memory-technologies, and systems-architecture will deliver servers with 100 gigabytes of main memory and petabytes of storage capacity in less than a decade at affordable prices. If present trends continue, we shall soon be flooded with low-cost, on-chip computers with several megabytes of main memory. By 2010, technology will enable enterprises to store and provide access to information at the touch of a button from any part of the world.

With the availability of these computing platforms, companies will be able to store data on-line. Database-system researchers will build prototypes to handle relational tables, structured data, and unstructured data in a transparent and seamless manner. The Net will become a medium for creating, publishing, and distributing knowledge and will make it possible for anyone to publish large amounts of complex multi-media content inexpensively. While the growth in bandwidth will only accelerate the growth of content , the management of the growing content on a Website will pose challenges.

Sophisticated e-Commerce applications will need efficient ways of tracking customer-profiles, transactions, billing, and inventory. web publishing, thus, will soon reach a threshold, where the ease of content-creation and distribution offered by the Net will need to be backed by the technology capable of managing large pools of content. Many large content-providers, portals, and retailers have moved the content management part to XML, a language capable of describing structured data. XML also supports client-side data caches for updates, leading to a set of distributed transaction issues: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (acid).

As we rush into the Cyber Era, organisational information systems will also become more Net-centric through the use of intranets and extranets. Net content-creators need tools that can quickly build data-stores capable of managing structured and un-structured data, and integrate legacy data as a part of the data-store inexpensively. This places tremendous demand on database technology, which must be able to automate the creation, management, search, and security of Net data-stores. The integration of platform-independent, easy-to-use Net technology with database technology will need the unification of data and programme logic within the data store, scalable, plug-and-play database management systems, a federation of database systems, new, smart, data architectures, and the integration of structured and semi-structured data.

As hardware changes raise capabilities through the roof even as they lower costs, there will be a proliferation of on-chip computers embedded in smart cards, palm-tops, telephones, set-top boxes, and other information appliances. But since servers with 50,000 concurrent users and petabytes of data-stores will be desirable and affordable, DBMSs need to be able to scale down to the information-appliance level, and scale up to the storage-server level. Database servers running in varied environment must be self-managing and reliable. As the integration of database and Net technology progresses, the number of information appliances and database-servers will make human administration infeasible, leading to plug-and-play database technology. These self-tuning databases, depending upon the capabilities of the appliance, will organise themselves for optimal performance.

Over the years, companies have built a huge inventory of legacy data, residing in multiple platforms and formats. With the increasing globalisation of enterprises, the heterogeneity of data will continue to rise. Database-servers will make it simpler to integrate the information from multiple databases, rendering the Net a federation of databases. This will need new query-processing architectures that are federal in nature. Also, the meaning and interpretation of queries in a federation may be context-sensitive. It may take a long time to execute under current database technology which strives to provide accurate answers. In these situations, it may be appropriate to offer coarse answers. The research agenda of the database community is now addressing these issues.

To better manage information flows in companies, many application-level frameworks address workflows. By compiling workflow rules into a set of triggers in a database system, and attaching them with the stored data, we can integrate information flows with data. This will lend workflow processes the high level of security, reliability, integrity, and concurrency offered by databases. The development of XML, a hierarchical scheme-oriented language, is likely to create a plethora of semi-structured documents. Despite efforts to address the integration, XML is likely to create a new class of documents with deeply-nested objects. The declarative data-manipulation language for XML is one such effort.

The grand challenge of information management is to provide an easy mechanism to store, organise, retrieve, analyse, and correlate all organisational information on-line. In the era of global competition, information will be key. To increase corporate memory, organisational as well as other competitive information from the federated servers needs to percolate down to all decision-makers. So, the information management professional faces the challenge of readying his organisation's systems to fit in these new technologies, and develop a culture of leveraging knowledge for decision-making in this Knowledge Economy.

Bharat Bhaskar is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow

Issue Contents Write to us Subscriptions Syndication