THE WALLACE E. CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MD 240: Management Information Systems
Spring 2001
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Technology Project
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Technology Analysis Project:
Your project team will perform this exercise. The exercise is intended to be a fun, unstructured exercise oriented toward brainstorming and exploration of information technologies. Teams often need some initial time to figure out how they work together (academics who research teamwork say that teams progress through several stages -- Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing). This project hopefully will help your team get to know each other better (Forming) and start working well together (get you closer to Performing). A secondary objective of the project is to "do some good," as the outcome of this project should be of real value to BCIT decision-makers, and will help expand the educational experiences of future BC students.
Problem Background
BCIT historically has concentrated on providing a limited set of organizational computing services to Boston College. For example, the BCIT data center contains computers that handle payroll, purchasing, human resources applications. As a result, many researchers have requested funding to purchase their own servers for research purposes, and many servers are sitting in offices across campus. The downside to this approach is that (i) professors need to maintain their servers, (ii) if the server is used for classwork, the service provided to students can be variable depending on the professor, (iii) resources are duplicated over and over again, as more professors get their own servers, and (iv) new professors have a significant lead time and paperwork effort in order to get their own server.
The Problem
BCIT traditionally has provided academic computing support for academic research on a VAX/VMS computer, which was phased out at the end of last semester. In its place, BCIT has installed new UNIX computers. The computers run one of the major UNIX "flavors", in this case IBM's AIX operating system (other flavors include Linux, BSD, Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and others). The vision being implemented is one in which "virtual" servers will be able to be dedicated to individual classes, such as this MIS class. While the computers are in place, BCIT is not sure about what applications would be of use to the parties that will use these resources. The parties include (i) academic researchers, and (ii) students in IT-oriented classes.
Your Task
Your task is to identify applications available for the AIX version of UNIX that might be of use to undergraduate business students. (Don't worry about the researchers and science students ... they'll complain loudly enough for the tools they will need.) Think about the kinds of class activities you do with your computer at school. Think about the activities and assignments you have done in prior classes that might be moved from the Windows PC lab to a UNIX platform. Think about whether these need to be command-line oriented or graphical user interface oriented (the GUI on UNIX is called "X-windows", and comes in versions called "Gnome" and "KDE", among others). Construct a vision of the business-oriented IS applications that you would like to be taught, and think about how this new AIX platform might allow you (and future students) to have such experiences. Track down appropriate applications, and verify that they are available for the AIX platform.
Your team will need to surf the WWW to search out applications for the AIX platform that appear to have some use for these known and desired educational experiences. You, as the end-user in the business topic area, have the power to suggest what is important to the education process. In doing so, you will learn about (i) the UNIX environment (in-class survey showed only 3 students have used UNIX), and about (ii) the free software/freeware/shareware applications available to MIS managers, and (iii) do some "good" by identifying useful resources for other students.
Some useful links to find sources of AIX software and information systems may include the following:
GNU.org (Gnu's Not Unix)
http://www.gnu.org/
List of categories of GNU programs - http://www.gnu.org/gnulist/production/index.html
List of GNU applications - http://www.gnu.org/gnulist/production/apps.html
IBM's AIX Site
IBM AIX application availability guide -
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/ibmsw/list/
AIX Free Software Sites
http://www-frec.bull.com/docs/download.htm
http://www.bull.de/pub/
Search Engines
Google - http://www.google.com/ (you might start by searching for "AIX free software")
I don't know if any shareware or freeware sites carry any AIX programs, but you may want to try to find one. Anyway, if you need some freeware or shareware for your own computer, you might find it at the following sites. These sites also might generate some ideas about software classes that might be important to have on the AIX computer.
Shareware/Freeware Sites
Dave Central - http://www.davecentral.com/
Dr. Download - http://www.drdownload.com/
Freeware32.com - http://freeware32.efront.com/
FreewareFiles.com - http://www.freewarefiles.com/
Jumbo - http://www.jumbo.com/
Moochers - http://www.moochers.com/
Shareware.com - http://www.shareware.com/
SourceForge - http://www.sourceforge.net/
Stroud's Consummate Winsock Apps - http://cws.internet.com/
TUCOWS.com - http://www.tucows.com/
Winsite - http://www.winsite.com/
If you find any other useful links to hardware, software, or networking sites during your search, please send them to me, and I will include them here.
Often, when you find a company that has a relevant piece of software or hardware for your business problem, you can find a much larger set of companies that create similar software or hardware by using the "What's Related?" button in Netscape Navigator or the "Tools>Show Related Links" menu option in Microsoft Internet Explorer."
Project Deliverables
(1) A write-up of several technologies you found for the problems of interest, and URLs for where those technologies can be found. Try to find one type of program or technology for each of the people in your group (i.e., a five-person group should find five technologies). Of course, this may not be possible, but given the number of applications on the AIX sites above, I expecte you should easily identify one for each person.
(2) A short presentation of your findings. The presentation should only be 5-10 minutes in length, and using overhead slides, will briefly describe your ideas and the software packages proposed to solve the problem. Note: Do not get carried away on this presentation. This should be more of a functional presentation, than one in which you spend a huge amount of time on pretty slides.
The write-up should be stored as a text file or HTML, and the write-up and presentation should be emailed to me. These files will be posted, and will provide classmates with a repository of descriptions of some interesting (and possibly obscure) technologies.