The IS, with its libraries providing 24-hour service at most locations, was just too big, handling too many transactions. We have been driven to be ahead of the trends and to be pro active. They want quicker and cheaper access, and they want it at their desk. This year, after many years of planning and much hard effort by my predecessors, we actually implemented a client server environment. We talk about using Sun workstations, and still use our C and UNIX to deliver our services.
Some people refer to that as an open architecture.
This architecture allows us to take a base driver of a system and port it to whatever machine needs to be accessed. We are not hardware driven. We have become content driven. These applications include graphical, byte mapped images a first for the IS network. Our client server configuration is still being implemented and is our immediate future.