Big ideas: ten tech decisions you must make now

Latin Trade, Jan, 2005 by Greg Brown

9 Watch out for TMI: Too Much Information.

Dealing with the data explosion will begin to occupy some serious time for info-tech managers, says Delio Cardona, data product director at Oracle Latin America. What was once managing the flow of e-mail and database information is growing to include documents, images, wireless messages, radio-frequency tag data, calendars, online meetings, contact info and so on. Business intelligence, once defined as the marriage of raw production numbers and selected financial statistics, will soon including the total flow of data through an organization. Managing well from the start is crucial, says Cardona.

"It has to be structured, not grow unplanned," he says. Countries interesting in signing free trade deals, for example, could soon be asked for volumes of product-quality data from the larger economies to which they hope to export. "We have to get ready," says Cardona. "Confidence in information is vital."

10 Security first, middle and last.

The amount of data moving across all of the above-mentioned systems--financial, production, strategic--all of it will need to be backed up, archived and readily available, but the sheer movement of information across open networks also implies risk. Viruses will run rampant, and they can, without a doubt, get into your voicemails and cellular devices, as well as e-mail and desktop machines.

Workers will begin to show up with tiny ways to store stacks of data. Camera phones are already banned in many multinationals (espionage is the risk) but even passwords are due for an update--randomly generated strings that expire in minutes are already normal in big tech clusters and data centers. Look for biometric devices like fingerprint readers and retina scanners to become common on critical systems and even extend to laptops and portable memory.

CASH MACHINE
Tech spending in Latin America is on the rise.

(US$ billions)

'02      23.8
'03      22.8
'04E     25.2
'05F     27.2
'06F     29.4

SOURCE: IDC

E = Estimate F = Forecast

Note: Table made from bar graph.