Our vision is for an increased integration across hardware and software environments in order to ensure improved data sharing. An integrated applications environment also leads to better systems development productivity and easier systems maintenance resulting in reduced costs, better customer service and improved quality. Our present systems are based on proprietary vendor standards, moving towards an open systems environment that accommodates a wide range of computers, allows a wide choice of database management systems, workstations and application architectures, and is compatible with a variety of communications and data architectures. These future systems have been selected and implemented based on open system industry standards wherever possible. Standard, open systems approaches drive down the price of information technology and reduce dependence on a single source supplier, resulting in reduced systems development and maintenance costs.
Open systems are also the direction vendors are taking.
In the future, it will either be centralized or decentralized, as business requirements dictate, but will be managed centrally. With a network-based systems environment, data can be shared and processing can be performed on computers most appropriate for the job. This will result in overall reduced costs, better service and improved quality. Instead of the traditional method of navigating menus to choose an action, an object will be chosen to which actions apply. Consistent, high quality user interfaces, whether graphical or not, are a vital part of all computer applications.