Inside the black box

Abstract

Your Information Systems department may seem as mysterious from the outside as the proverbial black box. However, in broad terms, IS plays three main roles: that of broker, interpreter, and visionary. It finds the right mix of in-house expertise and outside resources to approach computing projects, develops software that reasonably well implements a model of our business's reality, and looks to the future so that the systems we build today are flexible and robust enough to accommodate future requirements we cannot yet define.