Information Life Cycle I

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Information Life Cycle - I

• CSE/HFE 490/690Technology Based Venture

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Lesson Objectives

• To develop a good understanding of the role of
  information in todays enterprise
• To develop a better understanding of the spectrum
  of activities that an enterprise does with its
  information
• Study Information Engineering.

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Strategic Use of Information Resources

• Dell Computer Case
• Stopped selling PCs through retailers 1994
• Direct Business Model, enabled by a well designed
  information system
• No middleman surcharges
• IS enables the assembly of the most current
  computers satisfying the exact wishes of the
  buyer without the expense of large inventories
• Saving are passed to the customer
• Concentrate on producing only the current
  products important in low margin products
• Dell has maintained strategic leadership

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Strategic Use of Information Resources

• The airline industry 1993-4
• American, United, Delta, lost money
• AMR and Southwest made money!
• Q What contributed more to GEs profits?A
• Appliances?
• Technical products and services?
• Its pension plan/financial

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Value of Information
Subject Lost pet fees cost Toronto 700,000
... the city lost out on nearly 700,000 in pet
fees last year because nearly half of Toronto's
dog and cat owners were never billed. The staffer
who knew how to run the computerized billing
system was laid off. ... Only one city employee
ever understood the system well enough to debug
it when problems arose. That person was lost last
year due to downsizing leaving no one to get
things going again when the system ran into
trouble and collapsed. Source Toronto Globe
and Mail, 15 Feb 2001
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Computers in Business

• Introduced in to business in late 1950s
• Accounting tasks, payroll, accounts
  receivable/payable
• Manufacturing domain in 1960s
• Inventory, Production control, customer orders,
  purchasing
• By 1970s, many tasks were automated
• Costs were considered RD
• No serious accountability

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Computers in Business, contd

• High costs, as well as strategic importance of
  computer systems, became apparent in the 1980s
• Information Resource Management
• Strategic computing
• Today, most firms want their own specialized
  business information system
• Migration
• Integration

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Evolution of Information Systems

• Primary Role of IT
• 1960s Efficiency. Automate existing paper based
  processes
• Justification ROI
• 1970s Effectiveness. Increase individual and
  group effectiveness
• Justification Increasing productivity and better
  decision quality
• 1980-90s Strategic. Industry/organization
  transformation
• Justification Competitive position
• 2000s Value creation. Collaborative partnerships
• Justification Adding value

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Evolution of Information Systems

• Target of systems
• 1960s Organizations
• 1970s Individual, manager, group
• 1980-90s Business process
• 2000s Customer, supplier, competitor
• Information Model
• 1960s Application specific
• 1970s Data-driven
• 1980-90s Business-driven
• 2000s Knowledge driven

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Evolution of Information Systems

• Dominant technology
• 1960s Mainframe, Centralized intelligence
• 1970s Minicomputer, Decentralized intelligence
• 1980-90s Microcomputer, Client server.
  Distributed intelligence
• 2000s Internet, Ubiquitous intelligence

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Data, Information and Knowledge

• Data Atomic values, usually applicable to
  individual objects of the domain of discourse
• InformationInterpretation, generalization or
  validation of factual data, usually applicable to
  groups or subsets of the domain of interest
• Knowledge
• Verified, tested and validated information
  applicable to diverse situations.

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How much information
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A Manufacturing Scenario

• One computer contains a specification that
  describes, with text and numbers, a needed part
  and perhaps a flow chart graphic related to the
  part,
• another computer contains an engineering drawing
  or a CAD file that was derived from the
  specification for the part,
• yet another computer contains an inspection photo
  of that part, taken while the part is being
  materialized,
• another database contains a history of test
  readouts regarding that part,
• yet another file type contains a video of that
  part in normal operation and another showing
  abnormal operation
• the project schedule milestone, and personnel
  assigned to each task is in another data base,
• the financial data regarding the revenue, costs,
  investments, development projects, etc. for that
  part is in yet another data base,
• Minutes from design review, project review,
  lessons learned and other meetings are filed in
  various other data bases, perhaps in desk
  workstations.

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Information Flow in Manufacturing Environments
Enterprise
manager
level
Abstraction
Manager
Supervisor
Classification
Operator
Devices
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Information Flow in Manufacturing Environments
(more details)
Corporate Mgt
Enterprise
manager
Market Analysis
level
RD Dept.
Abstraction
Product Strategy
Production Planning
Functional Specification
Product Design
Product Physics /
Dept.
. . .
Manager
Engineering Drawing
Process Planning
Function Design /
Dept.
Engineering Drawing
Assembly and
Function Design /
Supervisor
Manufacturing Dept.
Fabrication Drawing
Tool/Facilities Planning
Control System
Classification
Operator
Part Programming
Device Control Info.
Devices
Process Control
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Information Flow in Manufacturing Environments
(ideal)
Payroll, purchasing
Corporate Mgt
Enterprise
Market Analysis
Market Analysis
manager
Prediction Data
RD Dept.
level
Abstraction
Product Strategy
Planning Info.
Production Planning
Functional Specification
Product Design
Product Design
Product Physics /
Dept.
Manager
Manufacturing Information System
Engineering Drawing
Process Scheduling
Process Planning
Function Design /
Dept.
Engineering Drawing
Manufacturing Info.
Assembly and
Function Design /
Supervisor
Fabrication Drawing
Manufacturing Dept.
Tool/Facilities Planning
System Control
Data
Classification
Control System
Operator
Part Programming
Sensory data
Device Control Info.
Devices
Process Control
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Information Management Systems Design

• Successful implementations require
• Analysis of information flow in various
  organizations across the entire enterprise.
• Abstraction and classification of information
  from the enterprise level to the lowest level.
• Identification of types of information.
• Specification of interfaces for information
  exchange (so that applications can be implemented
  independently).
• Various types of information and their flow must
  be identified and analyzed to support decision
  making and concurrent engineering.
• Information sharing and collaboration are
  essential.

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Information Systems Planning
What needs to be done
Abstraction
Strategic
How it should Be done
Tactical
Implementing
Operational
Classification
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Steps in Developing Information Systems

• Mission statement
• Information system objectives
• Primary information processes
• Identify customers
• Determine customer needs
• Develop product/services features
• Establish quality goals, and develop quality
  process
• Design and implement
• Test capabilities

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Information Availability

• Crucial to business success
• Depending on potential consequences of loss,
  great resources may be allocated to availability
  assurance
• Methods vary for on-line systems and batch
  systems (yesthey are still very common!)

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Information Types
Semantics - human understandable information
Discourse
Document
Film
Report
Theory
Animation
Algebra/calculus
Paragraph
Argument
Video segment
Aggregates
Drawing
Sentence
Concepts
Still image
Records
Functions/predicates
Polygons
Phonemes/words
Words
Block
Fields
Lines
Strings
Samples
Characters
Pixels
Numbers
Symbols
Signals/bits
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Information related activities
Preservation
Re
-
engineering
Retrieval
Storage
Presentation
Analysis/mining/
Packaging/
processing
Visualization
Coding/
Transport
Compression
Discard
Acquisition
Information Science
Information Science
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1. Information Acquisition

• Acquiring of business-related information in
  digital form
• Traditionally, record based data mostly in table
  form
• Now multimedia data
• Conversion to digital form for on-line processing
• Overall organization for seamless integration

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2. Coding Compression

• Coding of data in order to minimize its
  representation for reducing the storage
  requirement and reducing the bandwidth
  requirement in communication
• Need different techniques for each type of media
  and even each type of object
• Facsimile vs. aerial pictures vs. portrait
• Technique must be fast, one-pass, adaptive and
  invertible, and must not impose unreasonable
  requirements on resources.

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3. Analysis mining

• Raw numbers, words, images and sounds are not
  immediately useful their contents must be
  analyzed and represented in machine processable
  form
• Mining of databases for useful information
• Extraction of contents from images and video
• Conceptualization of text
• Feature analysis of audio segments

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4. Storage

• Business data can be very large and heterogeneous
  with respect to all parameters
• Appropriate storage techniques ensure proper
  management, location and distribution, and the
  flow of objects.
• Among issues to be considered
• Data placement
• What technology (medium) to use for storage
• Distribution local, remote, out-sourced
• Speed of delivery

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5. Re-engineering

• Legacy systems make up most of the business data
  systems
• Maintenance and modernization of these systems
  represents a large portion of IT efforts
• Important decisions
• Maintenance
• replace migrate
• modernize for co-existence

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Is legacy code like Chernobyl?
5. Information Re-engineering

• Remember Chernobyl? The meltdown of the Nuclear
  reactor. Officials poured concrete over it and
  hoped that, someday, it would just go away!
• Legacy code and Chernobyl Too messy to clean up
  but too dangerous to ignore!

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Legacy code...
5. Information Re-engineering

• Theory rebuild the legacy system from ground up
  with
• a relational (or OO) database
• graphical user interfaces
• client/server architecture
• Practice expensive and risky, because of size,
  complexity and poor documentation.

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Case study 1
5. Information Re-engineering

• 700 clients
• 120,000,000 credit cards (mid-90s figure)
• Over 14 tera bytes of data
• 2 billion transactions per month
• 19 billion disk/tape I/O per month
• Around 23 million transactions are processed from
  800 pm to 200 am

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Case study 2
5. Information Re-engineering

• 22 million telephone customers
• zero downtime must be guaranteed
• COBOL code Hundreds of millions of lines
• Many tera bytes of data owned by applications
• no sharing -gt redundant storage
• Regulatory change rate of return to price
  cap
• Reengineer 80 of the business process

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Case study 2
5. Information Re-engineering

• Incremental migration into a client server
  computing architecture
• Began in late 80s ago, still on-going
• Around 10,000 workstations, and growing
• Biggest challenge Inability of mainframe to
  participate in distributed C/S computing
• CICS unable to cooperate in a nested
  sub-transaction ? Integrity?

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About Legacy Systems
5. Information Re-engineering

• Large, with millions of lines of code
• Over 10 years old
• Mission-critical - 24-hour operation
• Difficulty in supporting current/future business
  requirements
• 80-90 of IT budget
• Instinctive solution Migrate!

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Migration Strategies
5. Information Re-engineering

• Complete rewrite of legacy code
• Many problems
• Risky
• Prone to failure
• Incremental migration
• Migrate the legacy system in place by small
  incremental steps
• Control risk by choosing increment size.

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One-step Migration Impediments
5. Information Re-engineering

• Business conditions never stand still
• Specifications rarely exist
• Undocumented dependencies
• Management of large projects
• too hard, tend to bloat
• Migration with live data
• Analysis paralysis sets in
• Fear of change

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Incremental Migration
5. Information Re-engineering

• Incrementally analyze the legacy IS
• Incrementally decompose
• Incrementally design the target interfaces
• Incrementally design the target applications
• Incrementally design the target database
• Incrementally install the target environment
• Create and install the necessary gateways
• Incrementally migrate the legacy database
• Incrementally migrate the legacy applications
• Incrementally migrate the legacy interfaces
• Incrementally cut over to the target IS

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A Comparison
5. Information Re-engineering
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6. Preservation

• Similar to physical security measures for
  protecting buildings, cash and other tangible
  assets, information must be protected while
  recorded, processed, stored, shared, transmitted,
  or retrieved.
• Must protect against loss, alteration, and
  disclosure
• Must prevent unauthorized access and unauthorized
  use of
• Computer systems
• Networks
• Information

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7. Retrieval

• Query languages have come a long way from old
  style navigational queries to todays
  content-based query languages
• Important Any constraint (e.g., a processable
  feature) may be used as the criterion for search
• Require efficient retrieval techniques, similar
  to those for data retrieval, for all types of
  information

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8. Presentation

• Information must be presented to the user in a
  form that is immediately usable
• Internet cookies take care of part of the
  issue
• Issues are diverse and range from formatting,
  visualization, language, and even cultural
  barriers
• In the case of multimedia information, both
  temporal and spatial issues must be dealt with

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9. Transport

• Moving of data/information from one location to
  another
• Most common form digital communication
• Technology selection for information transport
• What communication service?
• What protocols?
• What quality of service?
• What physical resources?

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10. Information discard

• Destruction of information once its useful life
  is over
• Generally, preserve data unless discard is
  needed
• Methods for discard
• Legal issues must be taken into account