Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 27

making, and they should be helpful in the complex decision making needed
in the context of fully integrated supply chain management. More auto-
mated decision making in both front-office and back-office systems should
eliminate/minimize human variability and error, greatly increase deci-
sion speed, and hopefully improve decision quality. Business Intelligence
(BI) tools, which are experiencing a significant growth in popularity, take
internal and external data and transform them into information used in
building knowledge that helps decision makers to make more informed
decisions.
Greater interoperability of diverse systems and more thorough
integration within and between enterprise systems is likely to
remain the most priority for all enterprises. An environment
for business applications much like the plug-and-play environ-
ment for hardware environment would make it easier for organiza-
tions to integrate their own systems and have their systems integrated
with other organizations' systems. Such an environment necessitates
greater standardization. This ideal plug-and-play environment would
make it easier for firms to opt for a best-in-breed strategy for applica-
tion/module acquisition as opposed to reliance on a single vendor for
a complete package of front-office, back-office, and strategic systems.
1.6 Autonomic Computing
The software systems of today are constantly faced with new and demand-
ing requirements in terms of their availability, robustness, dynamism, and
pervasiveness. Pressures on the maintenance of systems, services, and soft-
ware are increasing by the day—maintenance tasks are becoming increas-
ingly difficult and correspondingly more time consuming to carry out. It is
believed that we may be reaching a barrier in terms of complexity and that
innovative practices are needed to ensure the continual delivery of software-
based services.
IBM introduced the term autonomic computing to characterize the notion
of a computer system that is able to adapt to internal and external changes
with or without minimal human intervention. As the development, mainte-
nance and operation of computing systems are becoming more complex, we
are witnessing development of more and more automated deployment and
maintenance strategies. Based on dedicated tools, such approaches aim to
automate a number of administrative tasks such as installing packages and
modules, defining authorizations and updating configurations.