Use of technology to support both delivery and administration of education has come far since I stepped onto the campus of UNC Chapel Hill as a freshman in 1975. Green screens ruled, as the 3270 terminal, introduced by IBM in 1971 was becoming a common sight wherever large computing systems were installed. They provided connectivity to the System 360 and 370 machines that were ubiquitous in back-office support. There were “disturbances in the force,” though, as the hobbyist microcomputer industry was launching, with the Apple-1 around the corner in 1976. Computing was still an esoteric field then, and I took an undergraduate business degree at UNC-CH. At that time, the only computer science degrees at UNC-CH were graduate programs. However, the times were changing, and upon my graduation, I found myself writing financial accounting and payroll systems in RPG for the IBM S/34 and S/38.
The 35 years between then and this writing have been a time of seismic change, as Moore’s Law has delivered to us an amazing increase in computational power, while at the same time dramatically shrinking the form factor and introducing near-universal penetration of portable computing devices (phones!). While “MIPS” (millions of instructions per second) is a quite imperfect benchmark, as changes in computer architecture have clouded comparisons, machines of the 1970’s such as the 370/158 and the VAX 11/780 were considered “1 MIPS” platforms, and today’s smartphones are 64-bit multiprocessors providing 10,000 to 20,000 MIPS equivalent. Clearly, these are platforms on which serious computing can be accomplished.
Software has changed, but in many ways core application systems have been much slower to change, even as hardware changed around them. Sometimes this has been technical inertia and sometimes organizational inertia (unwillingness to change). Most application systems (including this blog) use relational databases, but the way of conceptualizing data flow in these systems has often changed very little. That’s what’s been so exciting about the emergence of the “app” on mobile platforms over the last five years. Small, focused code, working collaboratively with other apps or with older systems that don’t have rich user interface environments. Pushing change, evolving rapidly on a very short release cycle. Working with robust back-end systems, enhancing the functionality and usability. At the same time, this has forced “rethinks” in the way traditional systems are architected, as the user base wants continual access and accelerated workflows. Today’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are in many respects the software dinosaurs, watching the mobile apps scurry around, which are in turn evolving into powerful and agile systems in their own right.
I’m hoping I can take my longitudinal experience and help you chart a path for your organization’s system portfolio.