Ebook Management information systems (10e): Part 2

Ebook Management information systems (10e): Part 2 presents the following content: Chapter 7: eBusiness Systems, Chapter 9: eCommerce systems, Chapter 10: Decision support systems, Chapter 11: Developing businessIT strategies, Chapter 12: Developing businessIT solutions, Chapter 13: Security and ethical challenges, Chapter 14: Enterprise and global management of information technology. 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Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun a the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edg sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard foo in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was sett along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefel from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have b great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a comp white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 270 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row Management Challenges along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung MODULE III from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Business Applications Module III Information Technologies great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Development Processes Foundation Concepts BUSINESS APPLICATIONS H ow internet technologies and other forms of IT support business processes, e-commerce, and business decision making? The four chapters of this module show you how such business applications of information systems are accomplished in today’s networked enterprises • Chapter 7: e-Business Systems describes how information systems integrate • • • 270 and support enterprisewide business processes, as well as the business functions of marketing, manufacturing, human resource management, accounting, and finance Chapter 8: Enterprise Business Systems outlines the goals and components of customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain management, and discusses the benefits and challenges of these major enterprise applications Chapter 9: e-Commerce Systems introduces the basic process components of e-commerce systems, and discusses important trends, applications, and issues in e-commerce Chapter 10: Supporting Decision Making shows how management information systems, decision support systems, executive information systems, expert systems, and artificial intelligence technologies can be applied to decision-making situations faced by business managers and professionals in today’s dynamic business environment obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 271 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row Management Challenges along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung CHAPTER from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Business Applications Module III Information Technologies great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Development Processes Foundation Concepts e-BUSINESS SYSTEMS Ch apt er Highligh t s L ea r n i n g O bj ect i v e s Section I e-Business Systems After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to: Introduction Cross-Functional Enterprise Applications Real World Case: Toyota Europe, Campbell Soup Company, Sony Pictures, and W W Grainger: Making the Case for Enterprise Architects Enterprise Application Integration Transaction Processing Systems Enterprise Collaboration Systems Identify the following cross-functional enterprise systems, and give examples of how they can provide significant business value to a company: Section II Functional Business Systems Introduction Marketing Systems Real World Case: Nationwide Insurance: Unified Financial Reporting and “One Version of the Truth” Manufacturing Systems Human Resource Systems Accounting Systems Financial Management Systems Real World Case: Cisco Systems: Telepresence and the Future of Collaboration Real World Case: OHSU, Sony, Novartis, and Others: Strategic Information Systems—It’s HR’s Turn a Enterprise application integration b Transaction processing systems c Enterprise collaboration systems Give examples of how Internet and other information technologies support business processes within the business functions of accounting, finance, human resource management, marketing, and production and operations management 271 obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 272 13/08/10 7:37 PM user-f501 /Users/user-f501/Desktop Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and 272 ● Module III / Business Applications in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a SECTION I e-Business Systems great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Introduction Contrary to popular opinion, e-business is not synonymous with e-commerce E-business is much broader in scope, going beyond transactions to signify use of the Internet, in combination with other technologies and forms of electronic communication, to enable any type of business activity This chapter introduces the fast-changing world of business applications of information technology, which increasingly consists of what is popularly called e-business applications Remember that e-business, a term originally coined by Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM, is the use of the Internet and other networks and information technologies to support e-commerce, enterprise communications and collaboration, and Web-enabled business processes, both within a networked enterprise and with its customers and business partners E-business includes e-commerce, which involves the buying and selling and marketing and servicing of products, services, and information over the Internet and other networks We will cover e-commerce in Chapter In this chapter, we will explore some of the major concepts and applications of e-business We will begin by focusing in Section I on examples of cross-functional enterprise systems, which serve as a foundation for more in-depth coverage of enterprisewide business systems such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain management in Chapter In Section II, we will explore examples of information systems that support essential processes in the functional areas of business Read the Real World Case on the next page We can learn a lot from this case about the challenging work of enterprise architects See Figure 7.1 CrossFunctional Enterprise Applications Many companies today are using information technology to develop integrated crossfunctional enterprise systems that cross the boundaries of traditional business functions in order to reengineer and improve vital business processes all across the enterprise These organizations view cross-functional enterprise systems as a strategic way to use IT to share information resources and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes, and develop strategic relationships with customers, suppliers, and business partners See Figure 7.2, which illustrates a cross-functional business process Companies first moved from functional mainframe-based legacy systems to integrated cross-functional client/server applications This typically involved installing enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, or customer relationship management software from SAP America, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and others Instead of focusing on the information processing requirements of business functions, such enterprise software focuses on supporting integrated clusters of business processes involved in the operations of a business Now, as we see continually in the Real World Cases in this text, business firms are using Internet technologies to help them reengineer and integrate the flow of information among their internal business processes and their customers and suppliers Companies all across the globe are using the World Wide Web and their intranets and extranets as a technology platform for their cross-functional and interenterprise information systems Enterprise Application Architecture Figure 7.3 presents an enterprise application architecture, which illustrates the interrelationships of the major cross-functional enterprise applications that many companies have or are installing today This architecture does not provide a detailed or exhaustive application blueprint, but it provides a conceptual framework to help you obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 273 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and Toyota Europe, Campbell Soup Company, Sony Pictures, and W.W Grainger: Making the Case for Enterprise Architects in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung REAL WORLD from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle CASE ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below W hen technology infrastructure lines up with business projects like musicians in a marching band, you know you have a good enterprise architect on staff Enterprise architecture focuses on four crucial C’s: connection, collaboration, communication, and customers Imagine needing to manually log onto five different systems to create and track an order, or spending 20 hours to research a project because you didn’t know that the information already existed in another department These situations result from fragmentation and siloed thinking; the goal of enterprise architecture, on the other hand, is to create unity Enterprise architecture’s goal is IT that enables business strategy today and tomorrow, says Peter Heinckiens, chief enterprise architect at Toyota Europe “The ‘tomorrow’ part is especially important,” he says The enterprise architect must map, define, and standardize technology, data, and business processes to make that possible This means that the architect must have both a macro and micro view: It is necessary to understand the business strategy and translate this into an architectural approach (macro view), but also be able to work with individual projects and deliver very concrete guidance to these projects that focus on the suc- F IGUR E 7.1 Enterprise architects create unity out of siloed thinking and disparate applications Source: © Corbis/Photolibrary cessful delivery of the individual project within that macro view “The enterprise architect transforms tech-speak into the language of business solutions, and he knows what technology is needed to enable business strategy,” says Heinckiens In other words, an architect knows how to bridge silos An oft-used metaphor compares the enterprise architect’s role to that of the city planner, who also provides the road maps, zoning, common requirements, regulations, and strategy— albeit for a company, rather than for a city And this role is increasingly important as enterprise architecture itself becomes more important “Enterprise architecture’s roots are in the desire to serve what is best for the enterprise versus the individual department or project,” says Andy Croft, Campbell Soup Company’s vice president of IT-shared services Croft, who has the enterprise architect role at Campbell’s, speaks of the days when incompatible e-mail systems made employees within the same company unable to share information via e-mail Each department thought it needed its own brand of PC—even its own network or security system Finally, Croft says, “People lifted their heads and thought, maybe it’s more important to be able to work together rather than [sic] me having the ‘best.’” Enterprise architecture gained traction from the bottom up That siloed view on projects may come in the form of “I want to use this package” or “I want to build this application,” according to Heinckiens As an architect, he advises, it’s important to take a step back: Try to understand what problem the proposed project will solve Is there already a solution that covers the proposed area being researched? Does the proposed project fit into the wider picture? “Structurally, business units are silos—and therefore often have a limited view—but the enterprise architect ensures that the pieces of the wider-picture puzzle fit together,” says Heinckiens As an illustration, some projects use data that nobody else in the company will be interested in, whereas other projects use data that are useful and relevant to everyone in the company It is the enterprise architect’s job to figure out how to make the latter type available to the rest of the company, and one part of that task is creating compliance standards “It is important that this discussion takes place,” says Heinckiens “Then you see other discussions start to happen.” For example, who owns this data? Who should receive permission to access this data? What is a customer? For the marketing department, after-sale department, and finance department, the definition of customer is totally different, even though they refer to the same person In many companies, this process is ultimately formalized At Campbell’s, it’s called a blueprint Before a new project can be started, each technology area must review a proposed project to ensure that it fits into the overall strategy Achieving that impressive lockstep between business and IT takes time and practice, of course Not only that, but an 273 obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 274 13/08/10 7:37 PM user-f501 /Users/user-f501/Desktop Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and 274 ● Module III / Business Applications in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung enterprise architect must be a voice that many kinds of people can understand, says Tim Ferrarell, CIO and senior vice president of enterprise systems at W W Grainger, a $6.4 billion distributor of heavy equipment Ideally, Ferrarell says, this person “can think at a strategic level and all the way down to the operating level and understand how to move up and down that chain of abstraction,” he says “And know how to deal with conflicts and trade-offs.” Is that all? Actually, no That person also has to gain the confidence of the senior leadership team, he says Execs must believe that the enterprise architect understands how the company works, where it wants to go, and how technology helps or hinders, he says Then, effective working relationships can bloom In 2006, Grainger went live with a companywide SAP project: 20 SAP modules and 30 additional applications that would touch 425 locations To help guard against what could go wrong in a big-bang cutover, Ferrarell took his team of about 20 enterprise architects off their regular jobs and assigned them to design and integration roles on the SAP project The SAP implementation was such an all-encompassing program that it made sense to repurpose the enterprise architects into key roles in the project Their broad business and technical knowledge made them very valuable team members, says Ferrarell Grainger’s senior business-side managers knew these architects and their business savvy firsthand, he explains The trust was there, which helped get IT the intense cooperation needed during and after the complicated launch Their architects played a significant role, not only in shaping the need for completion of the ERP project, but in ensuring that its design would enable their business requirements The SAP project succeeded, Ferrarell says, in part due to the institutional knowledge and business-IT translation skills the enterprise architects brought to it Other companies, though, have to be convinced of the enterprise architect’s criticality Sony Pictures Entertainment launched an enterprise architect role modestly in 2002, focused at first on technology issues only, says David Buckholtz, vice president of planning, enterprise architecture and quality at the media company He had to start small: Sony Pictures Entertainment didn’t even have a corporatewide IT department until the late 1990s, Buckholtz says The company grew from acquisitions and other deals that parent company Sony Corporation of America made in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the acquisition of Columbia TriStar movie studio (The Karate Kid and Ghost Busters) and the acquisition of Merv Griffin Enterprises (Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy) “We’re in a creative industry and people made a lot of decisions on their own,” he says Hence, no central IT until relatively recently and no strong belief in the importance of central IT, he says Buckholtz was hired from General Electric to start an enterprise architecture team because Sony Pictures wanted more efficiency and savings from IT, he says At first, he concentrated on classifying existing and future technology investments Categories include technologies in development where Sony is doing proofs of concept; technologies in pilot; current and supported; supported but older versions; those headed to retirement; and those that are obsolete and no longer supported except “under extreme duress,” Buckholtz says, laughing He began this way to demonstrate that IT could be businesslike: investing well, conscious of risk, and planning for the future “This is how you plan enterprise architecture when you don’t have business support yet We had to build up to that.” Once the architecture group has the enterprise IT house under control, it can look for ways to work with different business technology groups to build credibility beyond bits and bytes, he says One technique Buckholtz used was to install architects in different business groups to work on projects on business turf but using IT’s budget A free trial, in a sense By 2005, Buckholtz’s group had started a high-profile project with the digital media team to map out how Sony Pictures would digitize content for downloading to mobile phones and other devices He counts it as a success that the digital media group continues to use that road map today “We identified high-value work and we were all committed to it,” he says “It was not a group off somewhere, passing down standards.” As the economy tightens Sony Pictures must make its distribution chain as efficient as possible, he adds Movies, after all, are a discretionary expense for consumers, and if they pull back on luxuries, Sony Pictures will feel it Enterprise architects continuously reinforce to business-side counterparts the expected returns on IT projects as the temptation to cut spending grows “We make sure we close the loop and quantify harddollar costs and benefits for the CFO,” Buckholtz says from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below CASE STUDY QUESTIONS What does the position of enterprise architect entail? What qualifications or experiences would you think a good enterprise architect should have? Support your answer with examples from the case Consider the different companies mentioned in the case and their experiences with enterprise architecture Does this approach seem to work better in certain types of companies or industries than in others? Why or why not? What is the value derived from companies with mature enterprise architectures? Can you see any disadvantages? Discuss Source: Adapted from Diann Daniel, “The Rising Importance of the Enterprise Architect,” CIO.com, March 31, 2007; and Kim S Nash, “The Case for Enterprise Architects,” CIO.com, December 23, 2008 REAL WORLD ACTIVITIES Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a recent approach to systems development and implementation that has much in common (and some differences, as well) with enterprise architecture Go online and research the similarities and differences Prepare a report to summarize your work Have you considered a career as an enterprise architect? What bundle of courses would you put together to design a major or a track in enterprise architecture? Break into small groups with your classmates to outline the major areas that should be covered obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 275 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and Chapter / e-Business Systems ● 275 in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung F IGUR E 7.2 The new product development process in a manufacturing company This is an example of a business process that must be supported by cross-functional systems that cross the boundaries of several business functions from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Customer Feedback Market Research Market Test Component Design Product Test Product Release Process Design Equipment Design Production Start Manufacturing Marketing R & D/Engineering Source: Adapted from Mohan Sawhney and Jeff Zabin, Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights into e-Business Transformation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), p 175 visualize the basic components, processes, and interfaces of these major e-business applications, and their interrelationships to each other This application architecture also spotlights the roles these business systems play in supporting the customers, suppliers, partners, and employees of a business Notice that instead of concentrating on traditional business functions or supporting only the internal business processes of a company, enterprise applications focus on accomplishing fundamental business processes in concert with a company’s customer, supplier, partner, and employee stakeholders Thus, enterprise resource planning (ERP) concentrates on the efficiency of a firm’s internal production, distribution, and financial processes Customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on acquiring and retaining profitable customers via marketing, sales, and service processes Partner relationship management (PRM) aims to acquire and retain partners who can enhance the sale and distribution of a firm’s products and services Supply chain management (SCM) focuses on developing the most efficient and effective sourcing and procurement processes with suppliers for the products and services that a business needs Knowledge management (KM) applications provide a firm’s employees with tools that support group collaboration and decision support We will discuss CRM, ERP, and SCM applications in detail in Chapter and cover KM applications in Chapter 10 Now let’s look at a real-world example of some of the challenges involved in rolling out global, cross-functional systems F IGUR E 7.3 Enterprise Resource Planning Internal Business Processes Customer Relationship Management Marketing • Sales • Service Customers Partners Supply Chain Management Sourcing • Procurement Partner Relationship Management Selling • Distribution Employees Knowledge Management Collaboration • Decision Support Suppliers This enterprise application architecture presents an overview of the major cross-functional enterprise applications and their interrelationships obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 276 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and 276 ● Module III / Business Applications in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Ogilvy & Mather and MetLife: The Interpersonal Challenges of Implementing Global Applications Atefeh Riazi’s quarter-million frequent-flier miles are testament to the fact that it’s not such a small planet after all As CIO at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Riazi has spent the past years rolling out global applications, such as collaborative workflow systems, creative asset management, knowledge management, messaging, and security for the New York City–based marketing giant Most recently, Riazi has been trying to convince the Asian, European, and Latin American offices to replace their legacy systems with North America’s SAP enterprise resource planning system for finance, human resources, and production A common enterprise system, she says, would provide Ogilvy’s 400 offices in more than 100 countries with access to real-time information so they can make quick decisions, better respond to market changes, and cut costs The fact is that globalization adds new dynamics to the workplace, and CIOs who stick to the true-blue American business formula will fail They must abandon the idea of force-fitting their visions into worldwide offices and move toward a global infrastructure built collaboratively by staff from around the world Take the company that rolls out a global system with high-bandwidth requirements That system might not be feasible for IT directors in the Middle East or parts of Asia, where the cost of bandwidth is higher than in New York Is the standardized system multilingual? Can it convert different currencies? Can it accommodate complex national tax laws? For global projects, working virtually is critical, but it’s also one of the biggest challenges “You’re dealing with different languages, different cultures, different time zones,” says George Savarese, vice president of operations and technology services at New York City–based MetLife His p.m Monday meeting, for instance, falls at a.m in South Korea and p.m in Brazil Savarese adds, however, that telephone and e-mail alone won’t cut it “You really have to be there, in their space, understanding where it’s at,” he says, adding that he spends about half of each month abroad “Globalization challenges your people skills every day,” says Ogilvy’s Riazi For example, workers in the United Kingdom often rely heavily on qualitative research; they take their time in making decisions, as opposed to Americans, who tend to be action-oriented So, in a recent attempt to get offices in the United States and the United Kingdom to collaborate on a common system rollout, Riazi hit a wall of resistance because she didn’t spend enough time going over analytical arguments with the people in the U.K office Having international teams run global projects goes a long way toward mending fences Ogilvy, for instance, manages a financial reporting project out of Ireland “The IT director there has a European point of view, so we’re not going to be blindsided by something that isn’t a workable solution,” she says “We have let control go,” she says of Ogilvy’s New York headquarters “A lot of global companies cannot let go of that control They’re holding so tight It’s destructive.” great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Source: Adapted from Melissa Solomon, “Collaboratively Building a Global Infrastructure,” CIO Magazine, June 1, 2003 Enterprise Application Integration How does a business interconnect some of the cross-functional enterprise systems? Enterprise application integration (EAI) software is being used by many companies to connect their major e-business applications See Figure 7.4 EAI software enables users to model the business processes involved in the interactions that should occur between business applications EAI also provides middleware that performs data conversion and coordination, application communication and messaging services, and access to the application interfaces involved Recall from Chapter that middleware is any software that serves to glue together or mediate between two separate pieces of obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 277 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and Chapter / e-Business Systems ● 277 in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung F IGUR E 7.4 from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle Enterprise application integration software interconnects front-office and back-office applications ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky Enterprise Application Integration EAI Front Office Customer Service Field Service Product Configuration Sales Order Entry white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Back Office Distribution Manufacturing Scheduling Finance software Thus, EAI software can integrate a variety of enterprise application clusters by letting them exchange data according to rules derived from the business process models developed by users For example, a typical rule might be: When an order is complete, have the order application tell the accounting system to send a bill and alert shipping to send out the product Thus, as Figure 7.4 illustrates, EAI software can integrate the front-office and back-office applications of a business so they work together in a seamless, integrated way This is a vital capability that provides real business value to a business enterprise that must respond quickly and effectively to business events and customer demands For example, the integration of enterprise application clusters has been shown to dramatically improve customer call center responsiveness and effectiveness That’s because EAI integrates access to all of the customer and product data that customer representatives need to quickly serve customers EAI also streamlines sales order processing so products and services can be delivered faster Thus, EAI improves customer and supplier experience with the business because of its responsiveness See Figure 7.5 F IGURE 7.5 An example of a new customer order process showing how EAI middleware connects several business information systems within a company Call Center How EAI works: An order comes in via the call center, mail, e-mail, the Web, or fax Finance mail Customer information captured in the order process is sent to a “new customer” process, which distributes the new customer information to multiple applications and databases Once the order is validated (customer, credit, items), relevant details are sent to order fulfillment—which may pick the requested items from inventory, schedule them for manufacture, or simply forward them Fulfillment returns status and shipment info to the order-entry system and to the call center, which needs to know about outstanding orders Billing 1010101000101010001010100101 01010100010101000101010010 0011010100010101 submit EAI Routing Manufacturing Shipping Orders & Fulfillment obr76817_ch07_270-306.indd Page 278 8/13/10 2:58 PM user-f494 /Volumes/203/MHBR178/sLa1719X_disk1of1/007731719X/sLa1719X_pagefiles Chapter About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg The eyes of Doctor T J Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs GEORGE B WILSON Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and 278 ● Module III / Business Applications in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door We waited for her down the road and out of sight It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail- road track ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly ‘I want to get one for the apartment They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to John D Rockefeller In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window ‘All kinds What kind you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back ‘Look at that coat Some coat That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively ‘Here’s your money Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Coty, Unilever, and iWay: Dealing with Integration Challenges It’s one thing to integrate data across applications in an IT infrastructure The methods and practices are tried and true But implementing data integration across a serviceoriented architecture poses new challenges Coty, the fragrance and personal-care products company, found that the iWay approach was just what it needed to integrate Unilever’s cosmetics business, which it acquired in late 2005, in just six months Failure to meet that goal would delay the benefits to customers of dealing with one company and product line, and would force Coty to maintain two sales forces, supply chains, and software infrastructures Soon after the acquisition, CIO David Berry heard complaints from big customers such as Federated Department Stores that its buyers had to talk to two sales reps after the acquisition or deal with three systems to push one order through Orders of Unilever’s Chloe or Calvin Klein fragrances had to be sent through a JD Edwards system in Lille, France Coty’s hot-selling Celine Dion or Jennifer Lopez fragrances had to be ordered through its homegrown warehouse management system in Kassel, Germany Orders for other products went through Oracle Cash-toOrder systems in Coty’s North Carolina distribution center But connecting JD Edwards to Oracle applications or Oracle apps to SAP is what iWay connectors and adapters Berry realized he needed to identify the processes that led to the customer getting, for example, two invoices from Coty, and force them into a single process They got iWay’s Service Manager to understand the differences between Coty’s order entry systems and perform the data transformations between them once a business analyst drew process flow lines on Service Manager’s graphical map of the JD Edwards and SAP systems The Coty order entry system worked in tandem with the Unilever order entry system until their results could be combined to yield one invoice The implementation had its share of rough spots Coty discovered at one point that a day’s orders, sent into the iWay system, never emerged at the distribution center The orders had been improperly formatted so they couldn’t be translated into the right destination format, but iWay neglected to inform anyone of the hang-up “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack We needed to improve the visibility into the system,” says Gary Gallant, vice president of information management for the Americas at Coty He found a way to get the system to send a message to administrators when orders were up in a “retry” queue Berry used this approach to identify customer-facing services, isolate them, and use iWay to translate between them The result was what appeared to customers to be a fully integrated Unilever/Coty by the six-month deadline great flock of white sheep turn the corner ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway Mrs Wilson was first concerned with the dog A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel Mr McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below Source: Adapted from Charles Babcock, “Two Ways to Deal with SOA’s Data Integration Challenge,” InformationWeek, July 9, 2007 Transaction Processing Systems Transaction processing systems (TPS) are cross-functional information systems that process data resulting from the occurrence of business transactions We introduced transaction processing systems in Chapter as one of the major application categories of information systems in business Transactions are events that occur as part of doing business, such as sales, purchases, deposits, withdrawals, refunds, and payments Think, for example, of the data generated whenever a business sells something to a customer on credit, whether in a retail store or at an e-commerce site on the Web Data about the customer, product, salesperson, store, and so on, must be captured and processed This need prompts additional transactions, such as credit checks, customer billing, inventory changes, and increases in accounts receivable balances, which generate even more data Thus, transaction