Most Effective Communication Medium

Grid Computing
By Sandro Azzopardi

Most industries today have become so dynamic that organisations have to consistently seek and adapt to change, in order to survive and prosper. Factors like more diversified customer preferences, technological advances, increased competitive threats and an intensified global economy are among the forces inducing change. Organisations need to become more adaptable embracing Charles Darwin's view that "it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is the most adaptable to change".

A survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in March 2004 shows that 47% of the CEO's of the US's fastest growing companies believe that their most critical success factor is having flexible strategies to respond to accelerating business changes. However, many recently implemented Information Systems still tend to ignore this need for flexibility and at times are hard to scale and customise, thereby limiting the ability of an enterprise to react fast to its evolving business needs.

In the last two decades we constantly experienced a dramatic change in the way we store and process digital information. Every few years there has been an industry breakpoint; an important new computing concept that changed radically the way computers are used and Information Systems are implemented. Examples include graphical and more user-friendly interfaces, the clientserver concept and the Internet. Such factors have somehow aided and contributed to position computers as a necessary commodity. Additionally, with the constant drop in the cost of hardware, and better and cheaper network bandwidth, computers have become even more ubiquitous. The Internet has evolved tremendously and is today considered as probably the most effective communication medium. Whilst technology tends to evolve in a non-linear fashion, Moore's Law has ensured that processing power has been increasing exponentially.

Though this is contributing to easier hoarding and dissemination of information, ICT professionals today still face tough challenges. ICT budgets grew rapidly in the late 90's in anticipation of the Y2K problem. In these last years many ICT departments have been even asked to cut their budgets while they were expected to continue providing an appropriate information infrastructure so as to enable the organisations to augment their products and possibly gain a competitive edge. Hardware replacement cycles are perceived to have increased. Generally speaking, ICT budgets did not grow in these last years in line with the computational needs of the organisations; whilst workloads are still increasing, the capacities to handle them are not.