i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11unboxed.html

According to Steve Lohr from the NYTimes, more and more services are going to be "mechanized" in the near future. For instance, in Alameda County in California, the social services agency now uses business intelligence software that knits together the information on an individual from several systems and presents it as a single Web page. The overall automation process is claimed to improve efficiency of government service systems by a "lean" approach to the information flows.

Although the transition to automatized information systems is probably an advantage for I.B.M. (which is one of the principal motors in those technologies) and some parties, the evaluation of the actual monetary benefits for the community and the buyer of the system are nowhere to be found - we are merely provided with (optimistic) estimations. Integrating largely scoped data into a common semantic framework is known to be a hard problem, let alone design services which will actually be used by consumers. On the overall, there is a great belief that systems will provide "intelligence" and "usefulness" by themselves, without much difficulty.