This chapter shifts you from the complex topic of network centric warfare to address the basic fundamentals of today’s information enterprise environment. It addresses how our information enterprise is structured and what forms of information forms are there. This includes use of text, images, voice, audio/video and data. It then provides an understanding of the information functions as to how to use these information forms. It helps create, display, store, process and transport information, and work on how these converge. It then introduces the concept of a decision pyramid which in detail explains data, information, knowledge, intelligence and how decision making requires all of them. It further discusses an information sharing strategy for large organizations and the information sharing value chain. The chapter ends by discussing a number of tomorrow’s information technology future trends.
TopChapter Content
As you explore Chapter 2, it will cover the following topics:
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A Glimpse at Today’s Information Enterprise
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Structuring the Information Enterprise
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Information Functions within the Enterprise
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Understanding the Decision Making Pyramid
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Information Sharing Strategy
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Tomorrow’s Enterprise – Future Trends
TopEveryone says that we live in an “Information Age”. With the beginning of the 21st century, it has become highly important to talk about the entire information enterprise. For large government and commercial organizations, this is a vast stage where information over digital and electronic networks is expanding at a very large rate.
Given that today’s enterprise is flooded with more information that can ever be processed, how can the special circumstances of today’s information age be turned into an organizational advantage? The decentralized nature of today’s information enterprise is at the heart of the Net-centric paradigm. How individuals, groups, and large departments handle the navigation and communication of large amounts of information is the key to addressing Net Centricity and its complex infrastructure.
We recognize that the information industry today is in the stages of a complete transformation. Historically, the industry has been organized on the basis of the form of information. Businesses have addressed single form of information provided as text, voice, image, audio, video and data. However, in the most recent decades there has been great movement in digital electronics to allow a complex multimedia of information that is a combination of text, images, audio or video.
This advent of multimedia information has been coupled with fast growth of digital networks that have expanded the ability to carry information from previous narrow band to newer broadband communications technology. Now that digital electronics is fast becoming the dominant technology for every information intensive organization, a realignment of our daily operational activities is inevitable.
The information industry is starting to reorganize themselves into the following three broad groups:
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Organizations that are involved in the creation and collection of diverse types of information
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Organizations that are involved in the manufacture of a wide variety of information appliances and their requisite user-based applications
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Organizations that are forming to engage in the various modes of information transport, along with routing and dissemination
This rapid movement of the information industry is enabled by the computer hardware industry, which is rapidly improving the logic and processing capability of computer chips, the ability for personal computing devices to connect to an all-purpose network, and the insatiable necessity for storage space, that allows the capacity to store information in large digital repositories.