Planning a job or a project before launching is logical and practical. Individuals and companies realize the worth of planning specific tasks and projects. The application planning of a major and complex function of a business is also equally important. Project usually has a one or two year time horizon, usually in three to five years range. Planning has gone through a stage evolution consistent with the stages theory concept of information system growth within most companies. It is not just an IS (Information System) issue but a corporate one as well. Managers have always been doubtful of planning. Planning is a hard work, not so much fun, defined not easily, rewarding and can detract from time devoted to day-to-day operations of the business.

System development is the entire set of activities needs to construct information systems solutions to a business problem or opportunities. The strategic plans states the firms overall mission, the goal that follow from the mission, and the broad steps necessary to reach these goals. The organizational strategic plan and the existing IT architecture provide the inputs in developing the IT strategic plans. The IT architecture delineates the way an organization’s information resources should be accomplish it mission.

Evolution of Information System planning

In the early stages of Information System, application were initiated and implemented as separate entities without much attention to integration. That was to get specific application up and running to satisfy a particular user’s need. The first emergence of planning was project planning. It was found that many of the earlier application did not really satisfy user’s needs once the implementation was completed.

The increase in computer resources, management became alarmed over the sharply rising cost of Information System services. This led to a third type of planning, resource or budgetary planning. Information System managers began developing annual operation plans, which necessitated looking ahead at least a year to projects what hardware, software, people, and facilities were required to run the operation and handle the growth portfolio of computer applications.

Structure of Information System planning

The information system strategic plan: IS planning must meet the following objectives:

1. It must be aligned with the organizational strategic plan.

2. It must provide an IT architecture that enables users, applications and database to be networked and integrated.

3. It must efficiently allocate IS development resources among all projects, so the projects can be completed on time.

The IS Operational plan: A typical Information System operational plan contains the following elements:

1. Mission

2. Information System environment

3. Objectives of Information System function

4. Constraints on the Information System function

5. Long term systems needs

6. Short range plan

Pragmatic planning: Executives and planners who address the key business direction of the company jointly conduct planning. This is followed and modified as market changes. The plan is the basis for action, not a book that’s put on the shelf for review by the intelligentsia.

Roles of Information System and user department

Users

Information workers, those who earn their living by creating, using, processing, managing, or exchanging information are sometimes termed white-collar workers to distinguish them from the so called blue – workers in industry and agriculture. Although accurate information worker is too abstract a term and is not normally used in business and in the information system industry. The more common name for information worker is user, a term referring to those who actually use the information and information system.

Types of Users: The term end-user is widely used by system analysis to refer to people who are not professional information system specialist’s jobs. The various types of user and their characteristics are:

(a)Hands on end user- Operates the system. It directs interaction through system requirement.

(b) Indirect End user- Uses reports or information produced by system but doesn’t operate equipment

(c) User management- oversees investment in development or use of the system. Has organizational responsibility for control of system activities.

(d) Senior Management- Incorporates competitive and strategic uses of information system with corporate plans and strategic. It evaluates organizations exposure to risk from information system failure.

The role of Information systems Department (ISD) has been changing from technical to more managerial and strategic. The role of the director of the ISD is changing from technical manager to senior executives, referred to as the chief information officer (CIO). The Important structure of the ISD is changing to reflect its new role; the ISD emphasizes vendor relations over software programming as outsourcing becomes more efficient than internal development of systems. The ISD must frequently work closely with external organizations such as business partners, research institutions, universities and consultancies.

A computer network is defined as interconnected collection of autonomous computers. Computer are said to be interconnected, if they able to exchange information. Connection is physically established through cables, lasers, microwaves, fiber optics and communication satellite.

What we mean by the word ‘autonomous’? Autonomous is any one computer in the network that cannot forcibly start, stop or control another computer in the network. In other words, the computer works independently. This is in sharp contrast to a computer with full control over many slaves. This is not a computer network.

Now there is another term ‘distributed computing’ which is closely related with networks. A distributed computer system differ from a computer network in one as aspect that in a distributed system, the existence of multiple autonomous computers is not visible to the user. The user can type commands that are executed in a different machine selected by the operating system. It is the job of the operating system to select free processor, find and move all the required input files to that processor and send the result to the user.

In a network, the user must logon to the network, locate files and submit jobs. The network management has to be handled personally by the user. In a distributed system, all jobs are done automatically by the system without the user’s knowledge. Hence the distributed system is a special case of network system, one whose operating system has a high degree of transparency.

Objectives of Computer Network

Right from the day of computer automation, a computer has developed computer in each department. For example, the task can be to keep of track off inventories, monitor productivity and maintain accounts. Initially, this computer in different department works as an isolation from other computer. These provided the necessary computer assistance in the activities pertaining to the respective department. It was not possible to share information among the departments. As a result, the information was replicated wherever needed. This increased redundancy caused increased in storage space, less data consistency etc.

Hence, at a point it was decided to connect the computers in various departments to extract the information and correlate information about the entire company. The following are the objectives of the computer networks.

1. Resource sharing is the main objective of the computer network. The goal is to provide all the program, date and hardware is available to everyone on the network without regard to the physical location of the resource and the users.

2. The second objective is to provide the high Reliability. It is achieved by replicating the files on two or more machines, so in case of unavailability (due to fail of hardware) the other copies can be used.

3. Computer organization has helped organization in saving money. This is due to the fact that the small computer has much better price to the performance ratio comparison than the large computer like mainframe. Mainframe computer are approximately ten times faster that the microcomputers, but they cost thousands times more. As a result of this imbalance, organization has preferred to install interconnected microcomputer connected to the mainframe computer.

4. Computer network have provided means to increase system performance as the work load increases (load balancing). In the days of mainframe when the system was full it was to replace with the other large mainframe computer, usually at and expensive rate not convenience for user.

5. Computer network help people who live or work apart to report together. So, when one user prepared some documentation, he can make the document online enabling other to read and convey their opinions. Thus computer network is a powerful communication medium.

6. Only authorized user can access resource in a computer network. Users are authenticated by their user name and password. Hence it is not possible to access the data without proper account. This increases security.

Application of Networks: Some of the network applications of the different fields are the following.

1. Marketing and sales: Marketing professional uses them to collect exchange and analyze data relating to customer needs and product development cycles.

Sales application includes Teleshopping, which uses order entry computers or telephone connected to an order processing network, and online reservation services for railways, hotels, airlines, restaurants theatre etc.

2. Financial services: It include credit history searches, foreign exchange and investment services and electronic fund transfer (EFT), which allow a user to transfer money without going to bank.

3. Manufacturing: computer networks are used today in many aspects of manufacturing, including the manufacturing processes itself. Two aspects that uses network to provide essential services are computer Assisted design (CAD) and computer Assisted manufacturing (CAM), both of which allow multiple user to work on a project simultaneously.

4. Electronic Messaging: E-mails transfer the messages between two and more users in a network. With this application user can transfer the information in the form of text, picture and voice.

5. Directory Services: It allows list of files to be stored in central location to speed up the world wide search operation. E.g. search engines like Google, Britannia, and Yahoo etc.

6. Information Services: It includes Bulletin Boards and data bank. A ‘www’ site offering the technical specification for a new product in a information services.

7. Electronic Data Exchange (EDI): EDI allows business information (including documents such as purchase orders and services) to be transferred without using paper.

8. Teleconferencing: It allows conference to occur without the participant being in the same location. It includes:

Text Conferencing: Participant communicates through their keywords and computer monitors.

Voice Conferencing: Participant at a number of locations communicates simultaneously through phone (talk).

Video Conferencing: Participant can see as well as talk to another.

9. Cellular Telephone: Wireless phone communication even while travelling through long distance.

10. Cable TV: This is widest usable thing today throughout the world.

Computer have made great in roads. Computers play a major role in all spheres of our life and are used in variety of applications: In process automation, education, medicines, research and development, business, banking, product design, space technology, communication, transport, legal system, metrology etc.

A system is a machine which is capable of performing high speed calculations and logical operations. It can also store and retrieve information instantly. It can accept input in a prescribed form, process it and give the results of the processing in a specified format as an output, using a set of instructions called ‘program’.

Evolution of computers

1. The ABACUS - The first calculating machine and earliest known computing device is ABACUS. It has beads or marbles strewn together in a wooden frame with a divider bar. The addition or subtraction is carried out by moving the beads or marbles.

2. The Slide Rule - Later, the slide rule, an analog device was invented by William Oughtred, an English mathematician. It represents numbers by length and uses the concept of logarithms.

3. Pascal’s calculating machine (Pascaline) - In 1641, the French Mathematicians Blaise Pascal, invented a mechanical calculating machine. It was called pascaline. It consists of dials and toothed wheels. In order to carry out addition/subtraction operation, the numbers to be added/subtracted are dialed and the result could be seen at a window. Due to his diversified interests, Pascal could not improve the Pascaline machine. Leibniz another great German mathematician incorporated multiplication and division operations and improved the performance of Pascaline.

4. Analytical Engine - In 1983, Charles Babbage, an English professor of mathematicians, proposed a calculating machine called Analytical Engine. This machine contained many of the concepts of present’s day computers. If developed, the machine would have taken an input, would have a storage unit, would have performed the arithmetic operations and would have given a printout of the results. Hence, for this pioneering work, Charles Babbage is known as the father of the computers. Ada Augusta Byron, daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron, helped Babbage in his work. She is infarct considered to be the world’s first, computer programmer. ‘The programming language ADA, has been developed in her honor.

5. Punched card - Dr. Herman Hollerith, an American statistician, used punched cards for tabulating and calculating data that was collected during the census.

6. Mark-I computer - The Harvard professor, Howard Aiken developed the first electromechanical computer. Mark-I computer was a huge machine occupying several rooms. Electromechanical relays and mechanical counters were used to carry out arithmetic calculations.

7. Atanasoff-Berry computer (ABC) - Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff, professor of physics and mathematicians from Iowa state college developed the first electronic computer and called it Atanasoff Berry computer (ABC). In this computer vacuum tubes were used as storage devices.

8. Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) - The ENIAC was built by John Mauchly. It could perform 300 multiplications per second and was the fastest machine at the time of its development. The external plug boards or switches were used to give instructions to the computer.

In 1945, von Neumann used binary numbering system for the computers in place of decimal systems.

9. Electronic delayed storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC) and Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC)- The EDVAC and EDSAC computers used the concept of stored program developed by Coldstine, Burks and Von Neumann. These computers were also called stored programs computers. A punched paper tape was used to store the computer program.

10. UNIVersal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) - The UNIVAC was developed by Eckert and Mauchly magnetic tapes were used for data input and output operations.

11. Generation of computers-

The first generation computer (ENIC, EDVAC, EDSAC, UNIVAC) were bulky and occupied lot of space. They were built up of vacuum tubes. Hey produced lot of heat and there were frequent breakdowns or faults.

The second generation computer (IBM 1401) used transistors in place of vacuum tubes. The relays were replaced by magnetic core storage device. The drawbacks in the first generation computers namely, large size and frequent failures and large heat generation are alleviated in the second generation computers. The second generation computers were compact in size and consumed less power. The sped of operations is also increased.

The third generation computers (IBM 360, 370 series) were characterized by the use of integrated solid state circuiting, new inputs and output devices and improved storage devices. These computers became very compact in size. The arithmetic and Logic operations were carried out in milliseconds.

The fourth generation computer made use of Large Scale Integration (LSI) and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) based chips. This led to the development of microprocessor based minicomputers and microcomputers.

The fifth generation computers provided advanced hardware with higher speeds and higher storage capacities. They incorporate artificial intelligence and expert systems. The other features include, use of new computer languages, advancement in man-machine communication, input/output devices incorporating speech recognition and recognition of handwritten characters etc.

A digital computer in its simplest form is a fast electronic calculating machine that accepts digitized information from the user, processes it according to a sequence of instructions stored in the internal storage, and provides the processed information to the user. The sequence of instructions stored in the internal storage is called computer program and internal storage is called computer memory.

According to the size, cost computational power and application computers are classified as:

1. Microcomputers

2. Minicomputers

3. Desktop computers

4. Personal computers

5. Portable computers

6. Workstations

7. Mainframes or Enterprise systems

8. Servers

9. Super computers

1. Micro computers: As the name implies micro-computers are smaller computers contains only one Central Processing Unit. One distinguishing features of Microcomputer is that the CPU is usually a single integrated circuit called Microprocessor. Microcomputer is the integration of microprocessor and supporting peripheral (memory and I/O devices). The word length depends on the microprocessor used and is in the range of 8 bits to 32 bits. These types of computers are used for small industrial control, process control and where storage and speed requirements moderate.

2. Minicomputer: Minicomputers are the scaled up version of the microcomputer with the moderate speed and storage capacity. These are designed to process smaller data words, typically 32-bit words. This type of computers is used for scientific calculation, research, data processing application and many others.

3. Desktop computers: These computers are the computer which is usually found on a home or office desk. They consist of processing unit, storage unit, visual display an audio as output units, and keyboard and mouse as input units. Usually storage unit of such computer consists of hard disks, CD-ROM, and diskettes.

4. Personal computers: The personal computers are the most common form desktops computers.. They found wide use in homes, schools and business offices.

5. Portable Notebook computer: Portable notebook computer are the compact version of personal computers. The laptop computers are the good examples portable notebook computers

6. Workstations: Workstations have higher computation power than personal computers. They have high resolution graphics terminals and improved input/output capabilities. Workstations are used in engineering applications and in interactive graphics applications.

7. Mainframes or Enterprise systems: Mainframe computers are implemented using two or more central processing units (CPU). These are designed to work at very high speeds with large data word lengths, typically 64 bits or greater. The data storage capacity of these computers is very high. This type of computers are used for complex scientific calculations, large data processing applications, military defence control and for complex graphics applications (e.g. : For creating walk through with the help of animation software).

8. Servers: These computers have large storage unit and faster communication links. The large storage unit allows storing sizable database and fast communication links allow faster communication of data blocks with computers connected in the network. This computer serves major role in internet communication.

9. Supercomputers: These computers are basically multiprocessors computers used for the large-scale numerical calculations required in applications such as weather forecasting, robotics engineering, aircraft design and simulation.