How technology is affecting our businesses and society

The most common business applications today are web-based applications. As in traditional system architectures, it is business requirements that drive data requirements first. Based on the conceptual data architecture, business applications are built which use the most suitable technology platform. A bit of systems development background: Mainframe applications were the only ones in the market since the 1950s. In the 1970's IBM introduced the midframe computing but most corporate applications remained in accounting, manufacturing and HR. In the 1980s the PC came into existence with Microsoft. At this time Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) started to appear rather than building applications in house. By the early 1990s the Client Server (C/S) model was developed which allowed a two tier system to exist in a network. Many mainframe and midframe applications were downsized using this new paradigm where the mainframe application was the server and the PC application the client. The advantage was to fetch huge information from the mainframe database and use the PC intelligence and presentation to produce management reports. The LAN technology helped connecting these PCs or nodes to distribute the retrieved info. Additionally, in C/S architecture only a fraction of the huge database was transferred based on the query generated by the PC database application. Windows, having now the lion share in the PC software market advanced to run on new microprocessors built by such giants as Intel. As a result of the invading PC technology, hardware came to be cheaper by the year. In the early 2000's the internet was widespread, and many firms sought to take advantage of this global technology in order to streamline their processes using reverse process engineering. And e-commerce applications soon hit the roof before they were crashed by the investors market. Yet, the PC proved to be a solid successor to the mainframe. In the 1990s and 2000s relational databases, and object-oriented programming languages continued to evolve that when the internet took over, web applications use now components-technology to combine from different sources and to make our systems even more effective. As reported in Nancy Mingus' lecture "Data mining and other sophisticated processing applications allow us to analyze data in ways not even imagined in the 1980s." How this affected businesses Today's web-based applications are no longer limited to the office processing. Communication protocols have allowed the web to go over to every business, every home and every country. Just count the email systems, the IMs, the wikis, the chat rooms...etc. I think that I could write a whole book about how technology transformed businesses. Nevertheless, we cannot leave that topic without mentioning the drastic effect of the internet on the social fabric. At home at least, people are spending more time at the PC since it allows them to chat and communicate more than they are spending with each other. The social fabric is deteriorating from a family-based society to an individual-based society. How are we reacting to this technological development? In view of this social and economic development, where do our families stand? Moreover, we have now a huge database of information on the internet. How would I, or my children know which piece of information is true? How would we tell the truth from the lie? How would we prevent our young ones from watching pornographic sites? But above all: Are we able to maintain relationships with our young ones? Are we communicating with them at home and church? Are we at least still praying together? Or is it too late? Just questions to you and me. George Farahat