These enabled us to provide online access to historical data in more effective ways than ever before. DB2 now consumes about 40 percent of mainframe MIPS at J.C. Penney, up from zero in 1987. The demise of the mainframe was greatly exaggerated, at least for large corporations managing very large databases. It is clear now that not everything in the corporation needs reengineering. Information engineering and CASE did not meet expectations.
Information engineering has tremendous intellectual appeal but suffers from two problems.
First, you can create 90 percent of a fully normalized data model for an application in one morning, but the other 10 percent takes forever. Look for router-based offerings running IP over Sonet that will bypass bottlenecks in the existing voice switches. Java encompasses everything that has been learned about programming in the past 30 years. It is the only truly object-oriented language. When PCs were the only alternative to CRTs, users often were provided with far more features than they needed or understood.