How the Information Age Has Changed the Information Systems Industry

The Information Age has changed the Information Systems industry by creating software that makes most tasks that would normally require expert knowledge user friendly, allowing complex tasks to be done automatically, and it also allows many businesses and organizations to communicate over great distances simultaneously. To understand how the Information Age has changed this industry, one must understand exactly what the Information Age is. The Information Age refers to the period where information quickly became available. This primarily began in the early 1980s. The Information Age also commenced the ongoing competition between businesses to obtain scarce information, which was regarded as a scarce resource.

The Information Age has changed the Information Systems industry by making most tasks that would normally require expert knowledge user friendly. Mrs. Linda Feliciano describes how she has seen database software develop over the past 20 years:

"I started working with databases in 1985, while working in an MI Brigade Automation Center. At that time, we used dBase-II. It was DOS based, required quite a bit of programming knowledge to create, and wasn't very stable because users then were also new to computers. It required complicated strings to run queries, so it wasn't really something a user could create on their own unless they had a programming background.

From 1995 to 2000, I worked extensively in an Oracle database. Again, it required programming knowledge to write queries or pull reports. We had a genius programmer on staff who wrote user front-ends for us, but it wasn't anything the average user could've done on their own.

I've been using MS Access for several years now. It is far more user friendly since it can walk a user through creating their database. Then, based on the user's level of expertise, the database can be quite powerful. The biggest advantage of Access is that a user with minimal skills can make a usable Access database and is limited only by their willingness to become more proficient in the program."