The Global Information Society and the Need for New Technology
- Documenting the Need for New Technology
- Distributed Information Systems Everywhere
- The Global Communication Spaghetti Pot
- Electronic Archeology: Layers upon Layers
- The Gathering Storm of New Activities on the Web
- Global Electronic Trade
- Agile Systems
- Cyber Warfare and the Open Electronic Society
- Summary: Staying Ahead of Chao
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Introduction
Highlights in Part I:
The challenges involved in keeping the human in control of today's electronic information systems
The basic concepts of CEP
How CEP can be employed to meet the challenges
Documenting the Need for New Technology
Events everywhere in our information systems
The Internet and the growth of global communication spaghetti
Layers upon layers in enterprise system architectures
Global electronic trade—understanding what is happening
Agile systems—future reality or just a dream
Can an open electronic society defend itself?
The gathering storm—global coordination or global chaos
Information processing using computer systems on a global scale has become the foundation of twenty-first-century life. It runs our governments and industries, our transportation systems, hospitals, and emergency services. It is the foundation for global economics and global electronic trading in the new millennium.
Information processing systems have grown up around the globe at "Web speed," only slightly slower than "warp speed" in science fiction. The Internet or "Web" has been a driving force. The technology to build these systems, to make them faster, capable of handling and routing larger and larger amounts of information, has developed to help drive this growth. New applications are appearing all the time to entice us into new ways of using IT systems.
But there is no similar development of foundational technology for monitoring and managing the information that flows through global information systems. And the fact is, if we do not know what is going on in these systems—and I mean "know" in the sense of human understanding—we cannot protect them, and we cannot use them to maximum advantage. This chapter describes our event-based world and some of its challenging problems.