The Integrated Enterprise
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks · 2015
he alignment of an organization’s infor-mation technology to its businessstrategies is a recurrent theme in ISresearch [1], and has featured promi-nently in recent surveys of critical issuesfor IS management [2]. Current corporate downsiz-ing trends have had the effect of flattening organiza-tions’ structures. A transformation of informationsystems has accompanied this organizational flatten-ing. Several different architectures have evolved dur-ing the transition from the monolithic centralizedsystems of the past to the decentralized, distributed,client/server, and network-based computing archi-tectures of the present. Despite their differences,many of these architectures share an importantproperty—allocation of processing tasks and/or dataacross multiple computing platforms. In simplecases this might involve storing data or applicationson a LAN server and retrieving them using a PC. Inmore complex scenarios, we encounter partitioningof databases and application programs, data migra-tion, multiphase database updates, and so forth. Thecommon thread in these scenarios is the use of coop-erative computing to accomplish a single task.The rapid growth of cooperative computingthroughout the 1990s has transformed the IS func-tion and its management in many organizations.The characteristics of this transformation frequentlyinclude a downsizing of systems away from main-frame environments to smaller hardware platforms,coupled with network-based approaches to informa-tion management. In other cases, there has been agrowth in the size and sophistication of end-user-developed systems, or the “upscaling” of departmen-tal or LAN-based computing, with LANs becomingthe repositories for mission-critical corporate data.Computing problems that once were assigned tomainframe computers are now routinely assigned to