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Ebook Management Information Systems: Managing the digital firm (Thirteenth edition Global edition): Part 1

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Ebook Management Information Systems: Managing the digital firm (Thirteenth edition Global edition): Part 1 presents the following content: Chapter 1: information systems in global business today; chapter 2: global ebusiness and collaboration; chapter 3: information systems, organizations, and strategy; chapter 4: ethical and social issues in information systems; chapter 5: IT Infrastructure and emerging technologies; chapter 6: foundations... 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Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario GLOBAL EDITION perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, Management Information Systems these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Managing the Digital Firm THIRTEENTH EDITION /IRRIXL'0EYHSRˆ.ERI40EYHSR Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Management Information Systems MANAGING THE DIGITAL FIRM THIRTEENTH EDITION GLOBAL EDITION Kenneth C Laudon New York University Jane P Laudon Azimuth Information Systems Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City Sao Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know Editor in Chief: Stephanie Wall Executive Editor: Bob Horan Editorial Assistant: Ashlee Bradbury International Publisher: Laura Dent International Programme Editor: Leandra Paoli Director of Marketing: Maggie Moylan Executive Marketing Manager: Anne Fahlgren International Marketing Manager: Dean Erasmus Senior Managing Editor: Judy Leale Senior Production Project Manager: Karalyn Holland Senior Manufacturing Controller, Production, International: Trudy Kimber Creative Director: Blair Brown Senior Art Director: Janet Slowik Cover Designer: Jodi Notowitz Cover Image: Marco Rosario Venturini Autieri/Getty Media Editor: Denise Vaughn Media Project Manager: Lisa Rinaldi Full-Service Project Management: Azimuth Interactive, Inc just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Pearson Education Limited Edinburgh Gate Harlow Essex CM20 2JE England and Associated Companies throughout the world Visit us on the World Wide Web at: www.pearson.com/uk © Pearson Education Limited 2014 The rights of Kenneth C Laudon and Jane P Laudon to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Authorised adaptation from the United States edition, entitled Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 13th Edition, ISBN: 978-0-13-305069-1 by Kenneth C Laudon and Jane P Laudon, published by Pearson Education © 2014 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners The use of any trademark in this text does not vest in the author or publisher any trademark ownership rights in such trademarks, nor does the use of such trademarks imply any affiliation with or endorsement of this book by such owners Microsoft and/or its 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America The publisher's policy is to use paper manufactured from sustainable forests Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know About the Authors just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Kenneth C Laudon is a Professor of Information Systems at New York University’s Stern School of Business He holds a B.A in Economics from Stanford and a Ph.D from Columbia University He has authored twelve books dealing with electronic commerce, information systems, organizations, and society Professor Laudon has also written over forty articles concerned with the social, organizational, and management impacts of information systems, privacy, ethics, and multimedia technology Professor Laudon’s current research is on the planning and management of large-scale information systems and multimedia information technology He has received grants from the National Science Foundation to study the evolution of national information systems at the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the FBI Ken’s research focuses on enterprise system implementation, computer-related organizational and occupational changes in large organizations, changes in management ideology, changes in public policy, and understanding productivity change in the knowledge sector Ken Laudon has testified as an expert before the United States Congress He has been a researcher and consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment (United States Congress), Department of Homeland Security, and to the Office of the President, several executive branch agencies, and Congressional Committees Professor Laudon also acts as an in-house educator for several consulting firms and as a consultant on systems planning and strategy to several Fortune 500 firms At NYU’s Stern School of Business, Ken Laudon teaches courses on Managing the Digital Firm, Information Technology and Corporate Strategy, Professional Responsibility (Ethics), and Electronic Commerce and Digital Markets Ken Laudon’s hobby is sailing Jane Price Laudon is a management consultant in the information systems area and the author of seven books Her special interests include systems analysis, data management, MIS auditing, software evaluation, and teaching business professionals how to design and use information systems Jane received her Ph.D from Columbia University, her M.A from Harvard University, and her B.A from Barnard College She has taught at Columbia University and the New York University Graduate School of Business She maintains a lifelong interest in Oriental languages and civilizations The Laudons have two daughters, Erica and Elisabeth, to whom this book is dedicated Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know Brief Contents just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise 31 Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Information Systems in Global Business Today 32 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure 191 Chapter Chapter IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 192 Chapter Chapter Telecommunications, the Internet, and Wireless Technology 276 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age 365 Chapter Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications 366 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 E-Commerce: Digital Markets, Digital Goods 400 Part Four Building and Managing Systems 515 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Building Information Systems 516 Global E-Business and Collaboration 70 Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy 108 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems 150 Foundations of Business Intelligence: Databases and Information Management 238 Securing Information Systems 322 Managing Knowledge 446 Enhancing Decision Making 482 Managing Projects 556 Managing Global Systems 590 (available on the Web at www.pearsonglobaleditions.com/laudon) References 591 Glossary 607 Indexes 621 Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know Complete Contents just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise 31 Chapter Information Systems in Global Business Today 32 ◆Opening Case: Efficiency in Wood Harvesting with Information Systems 33 1.1 The Role of Information Systems in Business Today 35 How Information Systems are Transforming Business 35 • What’s New in Management Information Systems? 36 • Globalization Challenges and Opportunities: A Flattened World 38 ◆Interactive Session: Management Running the Business from the Palm of Your Hand 39 The Emerging Digital Firm 41 • Strategic Business Objectives of Information Systems 42 1.2 Perspectives on Information Systems 45 What Is an Information System? 45 • Dimensions of Information Systems 48 • It Isn’t Just Technology: A Business Perspective on Information Systems 52 ◆Interactive Session: Technology UPS Competes Globally with Information Technology 53 Complementary Assets: Organizational Capital and the Right Business Model 56 1.3 Contemporary Approaches to Information Systems 58 Technical Approach 58 • Behavioral Approach 58 • Approach of This Text: Sociotechnical Systems 59 Learning Track Modules: How Much Does IT Matter?, Information Systems and Your Career, The Mobile Digital Platform 61 Review Summary 62 • Key Terms 63 • Review Questions 63 • Discussion Questions 64 • Hands-On MIS Projects 64 • Video Cases 65 • Collaboration and Teamwork Project 65 ◆Case Study: Mashaweer 66 Chapter Global E-business and Collaboration 70 ◆Opening Case: Telus Embraces Social Learning 71 2.1 Business Processes and Information Systems 73 Business Processes 73 • How Information Technology Improves Business Processes 75 2.2 Types of Information Systems 75 Systems for Different Management Groups 76 ◆Interactive Session: Technology Schiphol International Hub 78 Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Contents in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua Systems for Linking the Enterprise 83 that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know ◆Interactive Session: Management Piloting Procter & Gamble from Decision Cockpits 84 E-Business, E-Commerce, and E-Government 87 2.3 Systems for Collaboration and Social Business 88 What is Collaboration? 88 • What Is Social Business? 89 • Business Benefits of Collaboration and Social Business 90 • Building a Collaborative Culture and Business Processes 91 • Tools and Technologies for Collaboration and Social Business 92 2.4 The Information Systems Function in Business 98 The Information Systems Department 99 • Organizing the Information Systems Function 100 Learning Track Modules: Systems from a Functional Perspective, IT Enables Collaboration and Teamwork, Challenges of Using Business Information Systems, Organizing the Information Systems Function, Occupational and Career Outlook for Information Systems Majors 2012–2018 100 Review Summary 101 • Key Terms 102 • Review Questions 102 • Discussion Questions 103 • Hands-On MIS Projects 103 • Video Cases 104 • Collaboration and Teamwork Project 104 ◆Case Study: Modernization of NTUC Income 105 just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Chapter Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy 108 ◆Opening Case: Will Sears’s Technology Strategy Work This Time? 109 3.1 Organizations and Information Systems 111 What Is an Organization? 112 • Features of Organizations 114 3.2 How Information Systems Impact Organizations and Business Firms 119 Economic Impacts 119 • Organizational and Behavioral Impacts 120 • The Internet and Organizations 123 • Implications for the Design and Understanding of Information Systems 123 3.3 Using Information Systems to Achieve Competitive Advantage 123 Porter’s Competitive Forces Model 124 • Information System Strategies for Dealing with Competitive Forces 125 • The Internet’s Impact on Competitive Advantage 128 ◆Interactive Session: Organizations Technology Helps Starbucks Find New Ways to Compete 129 The Business Value Chain Model 131 ◆Interactive Session: Technology Automakers Become Software Companies 134 Synergies, Core Competencies, and Network-Based Strategies 136 3.4 Using Systems for Competitive Advantage: Management Issues 140 Sustaining Competitive Advantage 140 • Aligning IT with Business Objectives 141 • Managing Strategic Transitions 142 Learning Track Module: The Changing Business Environment for Information Technology 142 Review Summary 142 •Key Terms 143 • Review Questions 143 • Discussion Questions 144 • Hands-On MIS Projects 144 • Video Cases 146 • Collaboration and Teamwork Project 146 Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Contents in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in ◆Case Study: Can This Bookstore Be Saved? 147 volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Chapter Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems 150 Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to ◆Opening Case: Ethical Issues Facing the Use of Technologies for the Aged Community 151 4.1 Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems 153 A Model for Thinking About Ethical, Social, and Political Issues 155 • Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age 155 • Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues 156 4.2 Ethics in an Information Society 159 Basic Concepts: Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability 159 • Ethical Analysis 160 • Candidate Ethical Principles 161 • Professional Codes of Conduct 161 • Some Real-World Ethical Dilemmas 162 4.3 The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems 162 Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom in the Internet Age 162 • Property Rights: Intellectual Property 169 ◆Interactive Session: Technology Life on the Grid: iPhone Becomes iTrack 170 Accountability, Liability, and Control 174 • System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors 176 • Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries 176 ◆Interactive Session: Organizations Monitoring in the Workplace 179 Learning Track Module: Developing a Corporate Code of Ethics for Information Systems 183 Review Summary 184 • Key Terms 184 • Review Questions 185 • Discussion Questions 185 • Hands-On MIS Projects 185 • Video Cases 187 • Collaboration and Teamwork Project 187 ◆Case Study: Facebook: It’s About the Money 188 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure 191 Chapter IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 192 ◆Opening Case: Reforming the Regulatory System for Construction Permits 193 5.1 IT Infrastructure 195 Defining IT Infrastructure 195 • Evolution of IT Infrastructure 197 • Technology Drivers of Infrastructure Evolution 201 5.2 Infrastructure Components 206 Computer Hardware Platforms 207 • Operating System Platforms 207 • Enterprise Software Applications 208 • Data Management and Storage 208 • Networking/Telecommunications Platforms 208 • Internet Platforms 209 • Consulting and System Integration Services 209 5.3 Contemporary Hardware Platform Trends 210 Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Contents in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua The Mobile Digital Platform 210 • Consumerization of IT and BYOD 210 • Grid Computing 211 • Virtualization 211 that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re ◆Interactive Session: Management Should You Use Your iPhone for Work? 212 Cloud Computing 213 • Green Computing 216 • High-Performance and Power-Saving Processors 216 ◆Interactive Session: Organizations Nordea Goes Green with IT 217 Autonomic Computing 218 5.4 Contemporary Software Platform Trends 219 Linux and Open Source Software 219 • Software for the Web: Java, HTML, and HTML5 219 • Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture 221 • Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services 223 5.5 Management Issues 225 Dealing with Platform and Infrastructure Change 225 • Management and Governance 226 • Making Wise Infrastructure Investments 226 Learning Track Modules: How Computer Hardware and Software Work, Service Level Agreements, The Open Source Software Initiative, Comparing Stages in IT Infrastructure Evolution, Cloud Computing 229 Review Summary 230 • Key Terms 231 • Review Questions 231 • Discussion Questions 232 • Hands-On MIS Projects 232 • Video Cases 233 • Collaboration and Teamwork Project 233 ◆Case Study: Should Businesses Move to the Cloud? 234 Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Chapter Foundations of Business Intelligence: Databases and Information Management 238 ◆Opening Case: BAE Systems 239 6.1 Organizing Data in a Traditional File Environment 241 File Organization Terms and Concepts 241 • Problems with the Traditional File Environment 242 6.2 The Database Approach to Data Management 244 Database Management Systems 244 • Capabilities of Database Management Systems 249 • Designing Databases 251 6.3 Using Databases to Improve Business Performance and Decision Making 254 The Challenge of Big Data 254 • Business Intelligence Infrastructure 254 • Analytical Tools: Relationships, Patterns, Trends 257 ◆Interactive Session: Technology Big Data, Big Rewards 261 Databases and the Web 262 ◆ Interactive Session: Organizations Controversy Whirls Around the Consumer Product Safety Database 264 6.4 Managing Data Resources 265 Establishing an Information Policy 265 • Ensuring Data Quality 266 Learning Track Modules: Database Design, Normalization, and EntityRelationship Diagramming, Introduction to SQL, Hierarchical and Network Data Models 267

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