Managing Computers in Large Organizations

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Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. TRENDS IN PERSONAL COMPUTER SOFTWARE 35 Beyond development from scratch, which is expensive, time consuming, and hard to control, a productivity application can be made open-ended so that an expert user (not a programmer) within the organization can create a model template application. This application can then be used as a standard within the organization. To do this, however, expert users must have the necessary tools. The first, stumbling effort Lotus made in this direction was to include a macrolanguage with 1-2-3 that contained the rudiments of a formal programming language, control structures, variables assignments, and user interface primitives. It is clumsy and anything but elegant, but it is being used in corporations far more than we ever could have predicted. In fact, some of our corporate accounts have devoted 5 and 10 work-years of development in this area and their results are being distributed to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of users within their own organizations worldwide. A third type of open-endedness allows the individual application to talk to and work with other off-the-shelf retail applications. I predict that in the future usage patterns may well be focused on one or two core standardized products within the organization. At the same time there will be legitimate needs for perhaps as many as two dozen other more specific applications that can also be purchased off the shelf. Therefore, it is critical that a core productivity application be able to be integrated with those other applications. There are a variety of approaches that will be coming out to achieve this. In sum, open-endedness is not a simple thing. There are communities of users with different needs, vertical market needs, internal needs, the desire to create salable add-on applications to a core product. I think it will take a couple of years to sort out what the most desired aspects of open-endedness are and to determine what will become the accepted standard. Blessing or curse, we live in interesting times. Despite all the uncertainties I am quite optimistic about the value of delivering personal computer software and in particular integrated software. I see an absolute shift in these deliveries toward the corporate marketplace. As this shift is taking place, I think software companies are maturing as entrepreneurs and are learning to understand the real needs of organizations. With a modest amount of patience on both sides, organizations and computer companies are going to achieve their mutual goal of delivering good information processing to the broadest community of users. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. PERSONAL COMPUTER NETWORKS 36 Personal Computer Networks. Robert M. Metcalfe* There are three kinds of people in the world: the technologists who believe that technology can, will, and should turn the world upside down and who are engaged principally in revolution; the users who believe that everything is moving too quickly, wish it were 1965 again, and whose principal activity is counterinsurgency; and those who recognize that technology will reach useful application more slowly than most technologists would like and more quickly than most users would like. The progress of this technology is measured not by any absolute timeframe, but on the basis of how successful we are in matching the superstructure of technology to the infrastructure of organizations. Local networking, for example, is one technology whose super-structure is now being matched, successfully, to the infrastructures of various organizations. It is a technology bent on revolution: in my view, the next decade can be characterized from a computing standpoint as the decade of the local networking of personal computers. This represents the third major phase in the history of computers and in the application of computing technology. Not long ago computing meant batch processing on mainframes—the * Robert M. Metcalfe is founder, chairman, and vice-president of strategies and projects, 3Com Corporation, Mountain View, California. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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