Business Drivers That Influence Information Systems Development

For example, global positioning system (GPS) locators attached to trucks can provide near-real-time information on their whereabouts and even their speed, giving truck shipping companies the opportunity to monitor the behavior of their drivers. The end result is that there are now capabilities for gathering, aggregating, analyzing, and sharing information about and related to individuals (and groups of individuals) that were undreamed of 10 years ago. These improvements have in some cases changed what it is possible to do with the technologies or what it is economically feasible to do in other cases they have made what was once difficult into something that is so easy that anyone can perform the action at any time.

Improvements in the technologies have been dramatic, but the systems that have been built by combining those technologies have often yielded overall improvements that sometimes appear to be greater than the sum of the constituent parts. A fourth trend, enabled by the other three, is the establishment of organizations and companies that offer as a resource information that they have gathered themselves or that has been aggregated from other sources but organized and analyzed by the company. A third trend has to do with advances in software that allow sophisticated mechanisms for the extraction of information from the data that are stored, either locally or on the network.

A second trend concerns the increasing connectedness of this hardware over networks, which magnifies the increases in the capabilities of the individual pieces of hardware that the network connects.

Information that can be gathered and stored and the speed with which that information can be analyzed, thus changing the economics of what it is possible to do with information technology.

Business Drivers That Influence Information Systems Development