Submission + - Missing MIS: 5 Old-School Ideas We Want Back (computerworld.com)
CWmike writes: Back before the age of the PC, men in computer science — and they were almost always men — wearing white shirts, ties and pocket protectors, spent their days punching data requests onto cards. On machines such as the IBM/System 360 was built the entire hierarchy of MIS — management information systems, writes Michael Fitzgerald. Today, both machine and management style look Neolithic, he writes. Storage space, processing speeds and data volume have expanded far beyond what few in the 1960s could have begun to imagine, and the stove-piped, glass-towered, heads-down MIS departments of old have given way to decentralized, service-oriented, business-focused IT organizations. Nobody wants to go back to punch-card programming, but some other old tech practices could stand a revival. Cobol, anyone?
