Management Mass Data Storage: Pick up a typical textbook from the 1960s or early 1970s about data processing and you will likely come across diagrams depicting a single, comprehensive “data bank” of information intended for use by most or all key applications throughout the enterprise. This “data bank” would, of course, be housed on a single mainframe—either the enterprise’s one and only computer, or at least its most significant one—as would the transactional and reporting applications that would make use of that information content.

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Why Has EIM Success Eluded Us in the Past?

Pick up a typical textbook from the 1960s or early 1970s about data processing and you will likely come across diagrams depicting a single, comprehensive “data bank” of information intended for use by most or all key applications throughout the enterprise. This “data bank” would, of course, be housed on a single mainframe—either the enterprise’s one and only computer, or at least its most significant one—as would the transactional and reporting applications that would make use of that information content. Essentially, these diagrams and the accompanying text described what, in retrospect, can be thought of as prehistoric enterprise information management (EIM).

Fast-forward through the 35 or 40 years that followed this noble but typically ill-fated concept and one sees a long string of attempts that rarely reached their ultimate objective. Even when enterprise computing power was clustered on a handful of mainframes, each application typically bypassed the centralized data bank (if one even existed) and created and used its own files and early databases for customers, products, employees, and other critical data (see Figure 1) that by all rights should have been shared through a common shared service. The result—one application’s customer file inevitably became out of synch with all other applications’ corresponding files (efforts at behind-the-scenes reconciliation and resynchronization notwithstanding).

The advent of the minicomputer in the 1970s and into the early 1980s only worsened the problem, distributing multiple application-specific customer, employee, and product files across different physical computing platforms. Examples include Digital Equipment (DEC) PDP and VAX systems, IBM minicomputers (System 3x series, AS/400s), and Data General minicomputers. On the one hand, organizations had all the computing power they thought they would ever need—on the other hand, the mainframe use meant to be contained only a decade earlier continued to grow.