The Information Age On the information superhighway there will be few speed limits and no turning back Financial Times, 1994 Information is vital to modern business. Effective use of information is, at least, an issue of money; more often it is one of survival, and survival is not compulsory. The way in which information is generated, stored, transmitted and processed is changing in a way that will revolutionise many people’s work practices in the not too distant future. The end of the 20th century will be recognised as the dawn of the Information Age, as significant a change as the earlier Industrial. | Total Area Networking ATM IP Frame Relay and SMDS Explained. Second Edition John Atkins and Mark Norris Copyright 1995 1999 John Wiley Sons Ltd Print ISBN 0-471-98464-7 Online ISBN 0-470-84153-2 1 The Information Age On the information superhighway there will be few speed limits and no turning back Financial Times 1994 Information is vital to modern business. Effective use of information is at least an issue of money more often it is one of survival and survival is not compulsory. The way in which information is generated stored transmitted and processed is changing in a way that will revolutionise many people s work practices in the not too distant future. The end of the 20th century will be recognised as the dawn of the Information Age as significant a change as the earlier Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. The user end of this revolution is already familiar to most of us. As before it has been driven by the emergence of powerful new technology explosive growth in personal computers and the increasing use of local networks has given many the freedom to do a great variety of tasks without moving from a single location Cook et al 1993 . Further to this expectations of having the world at your fingertips have been raised. A global data communications market growing at 30 per annum is providing the necessary infrastructure. On top of this ideas of teleworking virtual teams and indeed virtual corporations have been shown to be viable through a combination of computing and telecommunications Davies Sandbanks and Rudge 1993 . In practice though the information age is not as cut and dried nor as straightforward as portrayed by some prophets and many suppliers . Behind the user s ideal of a world at your fingertips lies a complex infrastructure. The ways in which this can be assembled and controlled must be understood so that appropriate options and configurations are used. Central to this are the new data communications technologies Frame Relay 2 THE INFORMATION .
