Part III: Managing the Essential

Technologies and Operations

Managing telecommunications
Managing information resources
Managing operations

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-1

 Managing
Telecommunications
 Managing Telecommunications
• Telecommunications is the flow of information among individuals, work
groups, departments, customer sites, regional offices, between enterprises,
and with the outside world

• The Internet has also opened up a “cyberspace” where people can be in a

virtual world, where organizations can conduct business, and in fact, a place
where organizational processes exist. This is providing the foundation for the
e-business economy, as just about everything about telecom is shifting

• This lecture devotes itself heavily to this evolving telecommunications scene,

utilizing case examples from ICG Communications, National Semiconductor,
Toronto Pearson International Airport, BMW, Louisville Metro Sewer District,
American Greetings and Keebler

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-3

 This Lecture includes
 Introduction

 The Evolving Telecommunications Scene

 A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built
 The Telecom Industry is Being Transformed
 The Internet is the Network Of Choice
 Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality
 The OSI Reference Model Underlies Today’s Networks
 The Rate of Change is Accelerating
 The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance
 The Wireless Century Begins
 Messaging is a Killer App
 Coming: An Internet of Things
 The Role of the IS Department

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-4

 Introduction
• Telecommunications = electronically
sending data in any form from one place to
another between
– People
– Machines, or
– Objects

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-5

 Introduction ...
• Generally, IS departments have been responsible for
designing, building, and maintaining the information
highway in the same way that governments are
responsible for building and maintaining streets,
roads, and freeways
• Once built, the network, with its nodes and links,
provides infrastructure for the flow of information
and messages
• Telecom is the basis for the way people and
companies work today
– It provides the infrastructure for moving information and
messages

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-6

 The Evolving Telecommunications Scene
• The changes in Telecom are coming fast and
furiously. Here are some major changes taking
place:
• A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being
Built:
– The oldest part of the telecommunications
infrastructure is the telephone network
• This global network was built on twisted-pair copper
wires and was intended for voice communications
• It uses analog technology, which although
appropriate for delivering high-quality voice, is
inefficient for data transmission
– Dedicated circuit (switching)
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-7
 The Evolving Telecom …cont ...
• A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built ...:
– The basic traffic-handling mechanism had to change for data
– Today, the new telecommunications infrastructure is being built
around the world aimed at transmitting data, and consists of:
• Wired - fiber optic links
• Wireless – radio signals
– Both use packet switching, where messages are divided into
packets, each with an address header, and each packet is sent
separately
• No circuit is created; each packet may take a different path through
the network

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-8

 The Evolving Telecom…...
– Packets from any number of senders and of any
type, whether e-mails, music downloads, voice
conversations, or video clips, can be intermixed
on a network segment –
– Making these next generation networks able to handle
much more traffic and a great variety of traffic

– This architecture allows new kinds of services to

be deployed much more rapidly

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-9

 The Evolving Telecommunications Scene ...
– The Internet can handle all kinds of intelligent
user devices, including:
– Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones
– Personal digital assistants (PDAs)
– Gaming consoles, and
– All manner of wireless devices

– The global telecom infrastructure is changing from

a focus on voice to a focus on data
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-10
 The Telecommunications Industry is
Being Transformed
• The telecom structure of old was originally provided by
(often Government owned) monopolies
– Only ones with the $ to support set up costs
– Public infrastructure
• Gradually, the telecom industry has been deregulated
• The telecom industry is becoming like the computing
industry in that each year brings ‘predictable’ (and
‘huge’) improvements
– Performance
– Capacity
• Bandwidth on fiber is now doubling capacity every four
months
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-11
 The Telecommunications Industry is Being
Transformed ...
• ‘Last Mile’ problems:
– Who ‘owns’ the ‘last mile’
• In the 1990s, the ‘monopolies’ began encountering
competition for “the last mile”
– Bottleneck issues (hose to straw)
• Visualize the world’s networks as huge fire hoses
because they use fiber optic cables that can transmit at a
whopping speed of a terabit (1012 bits) per second; then
visualize the twisted pair phone line coming into your
home or business as a straw, only operating at speeds of
56 kbps for a modem or 1.2mbps for DSL
• The last mile problem is the bridging of this fire-hose-to-
straw gap
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-12
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-13
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-14
ICG COMMUNICATIONS
Case example: Changes in the Telecom Industry
• This competitive local exchange carrier provides voice and
data services in 25 metropolitan areas in the United States
• It was formed in 1984 to provide local telephone service in
Denver. It expanded to provide long distance, buying up
companies with fiber routes
• It later focused on being an Internet backbone provider,
serving ISPs
• When the dot-com bubble burst, ICG filed for bankruptcy,
but moved out of bankruptcy in late 2002
• ‘Similar’ things have happened in other countries
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-15
 The Internet is the Network of Choice
• What has surprised most people is the Internet’s surprisingly
fast uptake for business use
• In the late 1990s, the Internet caught most IS departments by
surprise, not to mention the hardware and software vendors
who serve the corporate IS community
• The Internet actually began in the 1960s when it was called
ARPANET, mainly used for electronic mail
• By 1993, it was still mainly a worldwide network for scientists
and academics, text only - no graphics

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-16

 The Internet is the Network of Choice ...
• That all changed in 1994 when the World Wide Web was
invented (By Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva.)

• This graphical “layer” of the Net made it much more user

friendly:
– Web sites had addresses specified by their universal resource locator
(URL)
– Its multimedia Web pages were formatted using hypertext markup
language (HTML)
– All the Web sites could be accessed via an easy-to-use browser on a PC
– At first populated by computer geeks’ homepages, business (and
‘normal’ people’s) use of the Web skyrocketed by the late 1990s

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-17

 The Internet is the Network of Choice ...

• The Internet has done for telecom what the IBM PC

did for computing: brought it “to the masses”
• In 1981, when the IBM PC was introduced, its
architecture was open
– An entire industry developed around this open architecture.
The same is happening with the Internet because it
provides the same kind of openness
– Like the PC, this openness yields the most powerful
solutions and the most competitive prices

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-18

 The Internet is the Network of Choice ...
• The Internet has three attributes that make it important to
corporations:
– Ubiquity
– Reliability, and
– Scalability
• Today, the protocols underlying the Internet have become the
protocols of choice in corporate networks, for internal
communications as well as communications with the outside
world
• The norm is now end-to-end Internet protocol (IP) networks

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-19

 XYZ COMPANY
Case example: Network Options

• The Internet will be the heart of XYZ’s corporate

operation. So the CTO will create:
 An intranet for use by employees
 An extranet for use by suppliers and some
large customers, and of course,
 The Internet as the all-important central public
network

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-20

 XYZ COMPANY
Case example: Network Options ...

• Serving remote users: XYZ has 4 choices of communications

wiring:
– twisted pair (standard phone line)
– coaxial cable (like cable TV)
– fibre optic (glass fibre that carries signals via light pulses) and
– wireless

• Modems can be:

– standard telephone modems (56kbps) – no longer really a viable
option due to size of files (PowerPoints etc,)
– digital subscriber line (DSL) modems at 1.2 mbps 20 times faster,
or
– cable modems at 10mbps or 200 times faster

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-21

 XYZ COMPANY
Case example: Network Options ...

• Serving local users: In the office, all the computers and telephones will
be connected directly to an always-on LAN. The various LANs in
XYZ’s offices will use hubs, switches and routers to route traffic
• The CTO will likely choose Fast Ethernet Protocol for his IP-based
LAN. It has speeds of 100 mpbs (10^8)
• Communicating Between Offices: XYZ employees need to
communicate between sites, so they need some sort of wide area
network. As expected, the CTO has choices here as well
– Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is high speed - up to 622 mbps
– A fairly new option for XYZ to link several offices in a city, or link floors
within a building, is a Gigabit Ethernet which operates at speeds of one
gbps (10^9 bits per second)

• The CTO is definitely going to base all his decisions on being

Internet protocol centric
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-22
 Extranets
• Not long after creating intranets, businesses realized
they could extend the intranet concept into an
extranet
– A special part of the intranet for use by trading partners,
customers, and suppliers for electronic commerce
• The notion caught on and extranets have become
an important component of B2B e-commerce

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-23

 NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
Case example: Extranet

• National Semiconductor designs and manufactures

semiconductor products
– To gain market share and move into new markets, it
created an intranet that the sales force could access and
keep up-to-date on products and order products
– It also created the “National Advisor” to electronically send
news, sales reports, and customer information to the sales
force and its management
– National also created an extranet for distributors and
channel partners, and a Web site for design engineers.
• The Web site is replicated around the globe, with
maintenance outsourced to a company with data centres
around the globe, which provides hosting and other Internet
INSY532 Lecture Slides
infrastructure services Slide-24
 NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
Case example: Extranet ...

• National’s Web site now supports 1 million design

engineers around the globe, who download more
than 10,000 data books a day, in about two
seconds each
• The company only needs to replicate its site once;
the hosting company takes care of global
coverage

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-25

 Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality
• Digital convergence is the intertweaving of
various forms of media – voice, data and video
• Convergence is now occurring because IP has
become the network protocol of choice
– When all forms of media can be digitized, put into
packets and sent over an IP network, they can be
managed and manipulated digitally and integrated in
highly imaginative ways

• IP telephony and video telephony have been the

‘last frontiers’ of convergence – and now they are
a reality

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-26

 Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality
IP Telephony
• The use of Internet to transmit voice to replace their
telephone system
– Few companies have given up their telephone networks for a
VoIP network, but as the cost differential continues, more will
switch
– Became ‘hot’ in 2004. Previously the voice quality wasn’t there
– Can be managed electronically from e.g. one’s PC = possibility of
ad hoc conferencing

• Rather than analog, the IP phone generates a digital

signal
– Routed over the LAN like any other data in packets either:
1. To another IP phone on the LAN
2. Through the company’s WAN to a distant IP phone on another of
the company’s LANs, or
3. Through an IP voice gateway to the PSTN to a standard telephone
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-27
 Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality
Video Telephony
• Similar story to IP Telephony
• Not video conferencing via a PBX, but rather
video over IP
– With the appropriate IP infrastructure, video
telephony can be, say, launched from an instant-
messaging conversation
• IP phones with cameras also facilitate it, phone to phone

• Heaps of new converged products are now

flooding the market now that high quality voice
has become IP based
– Watch this space!
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-28
 TORONTO PEARSON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Case study: Digital convergence via IP

• Canada’s busiest airport

• Network is common use because its infrastructure is
shared by all the airport tenants
– Each tenant has a private LAN for its own voice, data and video
applications
• VPN = private and secure
• Yet = can be (authorised) accessed from anywhere – wired or wireless
– Each gate can be used by any airline
– Baggage tracking integrated with passenger reconciliation

• Numerous benefits:
– Reduced network operations costs
– Consolidated network support
– Increased terminal operational efficiency
– Increased capacity
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-29
 Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality
The Battle Begins
• Setting up a collision among three massive industries
1. $1.1 trillion computer industry
• Led by the U.S.
2. $225 billion consumer electronics industry
• Asian roots and new aggressive Chinese companies
3. $2.2 trillion telecommunications industry
• Leading wireless players in Europe and Asia
• Data networking leaders in Silicon Valley

• The Internet and its protocols are taking over!!!!

– To understand the complexity of telecommunications, we now look
at the underlying framework for the Internet: the OSI Reference
Model

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-30

 OSI Reference Model
 The worldwide telephone system has been so
effective in connecting people because it has been
based on common standards worldwide
 Today’s packet-switching networks are also following
some standards in most cases
 The underpinning of these standards is the OSI Reference
Model.

 We now live in an “open systems” world, and the

most important architecture in the Telecom world
is the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-31

 OSI Reference Model ...

• Analogy of mailing a letter: - see Figure Slide-2

– Control information (address and type of delivery) on the envelope -

determines the services provided by the next lower layer and
addressing information for next lower layer

– When a layer receives a “message” from the next higher layer, it

performs the requested services and “wraps” the message in its own
layer of control information

– It passes the “bundle” to the layer directly below it. On the receiving
end, a layer receiving a bundle from a lower layer unwraps the
outermost layer of control information, interprets the information,
and acts on it
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-32
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-33
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-34
 OSI Reference Model:
The Seven Layers
 7 - Application Layer: contains the protocols
embedded in the applications used, e.g., HTTP (hyper-
text transfer protocol), which anyone who has surfed
the Web has used to locate a Web site
 The rest = read the text but many people are of the
opinion: “who cares”? – provided it works
 But just in case it doesn’t, the ‘techies’ need to know!!!
 Major area of outsourcing and use of external
consultants

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-35

 The Rate of Change is Accelerating
 Although no one seems to know for sure, many people
speculate that data traffic surpassed voice traffic either
in 1999 or 2000

 In 1995, exactly 32 doublings of computer power had

occurred since the invention of the digital computer
after World War II
 Chess example

 E-mail outnumbered postal mail for the first time in 1995

 Unfortunately now = many are Spam (junk)
 Looking for a solution!!
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-36
 The Rate of Change is Accelerating ...

• The number of PC sales overtook the

number of TV sales in late 1995

• Such changes will only accelerate

– Everyone in business must become
comfortable with technology to cope with this
brand new world of ever-increasing
technological change

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-37

 The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth
Abundance
 Decline in cost of key factors:
 During the industrial era = horsepower
 Since the 1960s = semiconductors
 Now = bandwidth

 We are now approaching another “historic cliff of cost” in

a new factor of production: bandwidth
 “If you thought the price of computing dropped rapidly in the last
decade, just wait until you see what happens with
communications bandwidth”
 Fiber optic technology is just as important as microchip
technology. 40 million miles of fiber optic cable have been
laid around the world, in the USA at a rate of 4,000 miles
per day

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-38

 The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth
Abundance ...

• Half of the cable is dark, that is, it is not used. And the
other half is used to just one-millionth of its potential,
because every 25 miles it must be converted to electronic
pulses to amplify and regenerate the signal

• The capacity of each thread is 1,000 times the switching

speed of transistors
– As a result, using all-optical amplifiers (recently
invented), we could send all the telephone calls in the
United States on the peak moment of Mother’s Day on
one fiber thread
• What about Fathers’ Day????

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-39

 The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth
Abundance ...

• Downloading a digital movie, such as The Matrix:

– Takes 7 hours using a cable modem
– 1 hour over the Ethernet
– Four seconds on an optical connection

• Over the next decade, bandwidth will expand ten

times as fast as computer power and completely
transform the economy

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-40

 The Wireless Century Begins
• The goal of wireless is to do everything we can do on
wired networks, but without the wire

• Wireless communications have been with us for some

time
– Mobile (cell) phones, pagers, VSATs, infrared networks, wireless
LANs etc.

• We are just on the cusp of an up-tick in wireless use for all

types of networks
 The 20th century was the Wireline Century, the 21st will be
the Wireless Century
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-41
 The Wireless Century Begins ...
Licensed Versus Unlicensed Frequencies

• Some frequencies of the radio spectrum

are licensed by governments for specific
purposes; others are not

• Devices that tap unlicensed frequencies are

cheaper = no big $ licensing fees
– BUT = possibility of collision between signals

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-42

 The Wireless Century Begins ...
Wireless technologies for networks that cover different distances

• Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs)

– Provide high-speed connections between devices that are up to 30 feet
apart
• Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)
– Provide access to corporate computers in office buildings, retail stores, or
hospitals or access to Internet “hot spots” where people congregate
• Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMANs)
– Provide connections in cities and campuses at distances up to 30 miles
• Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs)
– Provide broadband wireless connections over thousands of miles

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-43

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-44
 BMW
Case Example: Wireless LANs

• A plant in South Carolina has more than 30

suppliers nearby
– Real-time delivery of data to the suppliers is
key to efficiency
– Suppliers especially needed accurate inventory
data of the components they supply to BMW,
so they know when to make just-in-time
deliveries to the plant

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-45

 BMW
Case Example: Wireless LANs ...
 To gather inventory data for SAP to track parts,
scanner terminals in the factory transmit the data
from the barcode readers (as parts move through
the assembly process) to SAP via a wireless
network that covers the entire 2-million-square-
foot plant

 The system uses RF technology

 A number of suppliers have followed suit

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-46

 The Wireless Century Begins ...
Wireless Long Distance
• The only two wireless technologies are infrared light and
radio airwaves
– Figure 6-5 shows the bandwidth spectrum, which illustrates where the
different technologies lie
– Cell (mobile) phones use radio transmitters and receivers
 Call is passed from one cell to another – fades out of one and into another
– Much of the bandwidths and radio waves are regulated by
governments

• In the main, GSM has become the mobile telephony standard

for all but the Americas
– Unlike the computing industry, a number of leading global telecom
manufacturers are outside the United States. NTT is in Japan, Ericsson
and Nokia are in Scandinavia
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-47
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-48
 The Wireless Century Begins ...
Wireless Long Distance ...
• The first cell phones used analog technology and
circuit switching, now called first-generation (1G)
wireless
• 2G cellular. 2G, which predominates today, uses
digital technology, though it is still circuit switched
– It aims at digital telephony, not data transmission, but 2G
phones can carry data
– 2G can use a laptop with a wireless modem to
communicate
 Not always the most ‘reliable’
– 2G can carry messages using short messaging service
(SMS)

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-49

 LOUISVILLE METRO SEWER DISTRICT
Case Example – 2G mobile telephony
• When Louisville encountered big storms, sewer repair workers
had to return to headquarters to get assignment details and
look up customer records – a process that slowed their
response to the flooding
• Now they have laptops and wireless modems
• As customers call in for emergency repairs, operators at the
sewer district’s headquarters enter the orders into a database
that work crews can immediately access from the field
– They can view neighborhood maps, locate broken water mains and
pipes, and check out the most likely areas of damage, potentially saving
entire neighborhoods from flooding

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-50

 The Wireless Century Begins ... Wireless Long
Distance ...
• 2.5G cellular is extending the life of 2G digital technologies
– Essentially adds data capacity to a 2G network
– The problem with adoption has been pricing

• The goals of 3G are to provide WANs for PCs and multimedia,

allowing bandwidth on demand.
– CDMA (code division multiple access) is the universal standard for 3G
– It faces the same pricing issues at 2.5G – perhaps worse
 Court battles over the “leased” spectrum
 Costs to deploy not seen as tenable in many circumstances
 Hutchinson (UK) making a play in this area in Australia and elsewhere with
‘3’ (big brother of ‘Orange’)
– Sponsors of Australian Cricket Team

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-51

 The Wireless Century Begins ...
Wireless Long Distance ...
• New entrants are looking for 3G alternatives
– One is mobile broadband IP, which could actually provide 4G services
(the user paying for different kinds of services)
– Wireless mesh networks
• Links are radio signals not wires
• More flexible but uses a lot of battery power
– VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology is taking off in some
countries because it is seen as the best technology for providing
stationary wireless broadband
• Provided by DSL, coaxial cable and T carriers
• Heaps to be made and lost
– Watch the battles
– Ask your friends who are always up with the ‘latest and greatest’

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-52

 AMERICAN GREETINGS
Case Example: Extending Internet to Cell phones

• American Greetings, a leader in exploiting the Internet, is extending

its Internet presence to cell phones using WAP to garner a wireless
presence
• The company was one of the first with a Website — it sends
reminders to subscribers, and often finds itself overwhelmed on
holidays such as Mother’s Day
• It also forms “side door” alliances with retailers’ Websites
• And now, subscribers can order cards from their cell phone. The
company reasons that when people have idle time, besides checking
e-mail or playing a game using their cell phone, they also might want
to send an animated funny card to someone

INSY532 Lecture Slides 6-53

 Is Wireless Secure?
 Security is a major issue today

 Eavesdroppers need special equipment

 Radio scrambling and spread-spectrum technologies
add security, encryption protects data, and
eventually , 802.11i will provide a framework for
security

 Requires eternal vigilance

 Note: the network is often not the main problem

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-54

 Is Wireless Safe?
 Although a lot of attention is focussed on all the new
wireless services, a troubling question has not yet been
answered: Are these transmissions safe for humans?

 It is quite possible that there could soon be a backlash

against wireless devices, similar to protests against
genetically modified organisms
 Already = heaps of debate (informed and otherwise) in this area

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-55

 Messaging Is a Killer App
• What has proven true with data communication
technologies over and over again is that the killer
application is messaging
– Original purpose of Internet
– Email
– E.g. BlackBerry messaging service
– SMS in the ‘rest of the world’ (outside the U.S.)
• Instant Messaging = Considered by many to be the
‘killer app.’ of wireless
– Not just for teenagers e.g. U.S. Navy (9/11)
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-56
 Messaging Is a Killer App ...
• The key attribute of Instant Messaging (IM) is that it
provides presence, which means that a person on
your buddy list can see when you are using a
computer or phone and therefore knows you are
“present” and available to receive an IM

• Newer technologies will allow messaging to become

even more personal
– Photo messaging
– Video messaging
– Video phones
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-57
 KEEBLER
Case example: Instant Messaging (IM)

 September 2002 – this cookie and cracker company

launched Recipe-Buddie on its Web site
 “She” is an instant-messenger bot that converses with people
who IM her
 She only talks about recipes using her database
 Very successful

 Three lessons learnt:

1. Users really like to converse with bots
2. Scripting is just like writing a novel – needs to be done by just a
couple of people working closely together
3. Others, besides the original scripters, should be able to add their
own content e.g. answers to FAQs
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-58
 Coming: An Internet of Things
• Wireless communications = not just for people
– A machine-to-machine Internet is coming
• Likely to use Wi-Fi as one wireless communication protocol
• RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)
– Like the barcode = involves small tags affixed to
objects that provide information about the object
• Discussed in detail in Chapter 11

• Communication systems = a mix of wired and

wireless = one of the many challenges for CIOs

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-59

 The Role of the IS Department
 This long discussion of telecommunications
gives just a glimpse into its complexity as well
as its increasing importance
 What is the IS department’s role?

 IS has three roles:

 create the telecom architecture
 run it, and
 stay close to the forefront of the field
 Sound familiar?

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-60

 The Role of the IS Department ...

• The key challenge in network design is

connectivity
• Connectivity means allowing users to
communicate up, down, across, and out of
an organization
• The goal is not a single, coherent network,
but rather finding a means to interface many
dissimilar networks, so that users think they
have one network
– Like we do with the telephone, Internet etc.
INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-61
 The Role of the IS Department ...
• A truly interoperable network would allow PCs, laptops, and
handheld devices to interoperate with servers running Linux and
Windows and mainframes running MVS and communicating over
IP networks
– This interoperability is the goal of architecture and is the main job
of the IS department

• The second job of the IS department is to operate the network

– Many companies are outsourcing (part of) this work

• The third job of IS is to stay current with the technology

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-62

 Conclusion
 The Telecom world is big and getting bigger by the
day. It is complex, and getting more complex every
day
 Don’t worry – there’s plenty of help available!
 The business world of old has depended on
communications, of course, but not to the extent of
the ‘New Economy’
 The first generation of the Internet economy has
been wired. The second is unwired
 Today telecom is all about connecting and the
number of possible connections is about to explode
worldwide

INSY532 Lecture Slides Slide-63