On 24 Mar 2008 13:26:16 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Gerhard Adam) wrote: >Similarly, even though many applications components are commodities, many >other elements are also assumed, so resources need to be expended to live up >to the expectation. For example, in the past while response time was useful >to improve productivity, etc. In today's "commodity" environment it is an >expectation that the customer has. While it is a "commodity" it is also an >expectation, so that failure to provide expected services becomes a >competitive disadvantage in today's IT world. In the past a database might >have provided advantage by allowing a corporation to access customer data >more quickly than a competitor. In today's environment, the database is >"assumed" and failure to being able to access customer data is a liability.
One job I had was working with two insurance company data warehouses after one bought the other. They didn't quite track all the same things. Our job was to integrate them so that the customers could use them both without comparing apples to oranges. It could become very easy to commoditize a company's data until it fit in a way that we know how to use. What's much harder for both data processing and for users is to figure out how to collect and use data that might give us that competitive advantage - without spending more than the return. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
