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Datawarehousing 
Italtel 
Media, Arts and Entertainment
Please describe your application and the information technology used in conjunction with it. Please keep your language simple and your explanations non-technical.
Inside Italtel, (now a STET and Siemens Company), in 1983 a project started called RCRS (Research & Development Computer network).
The main goals was to use the information and communication technology in order to integrate different organizations, departments and people across the company in order to share knowledge and informations: in 1983 we knew that "the computer is the network"!
So first of all the standards were established: in all locations (nationwide in Italy) and in the different organizations (at that time, divisions) were settled a wide Ethernet network, centralized computer rooms with DEC VAXclusters/VMS, common development tools for the maximum of sinergy beetwen people and a new Technical Information System was developed for the different phases of the various projects: the final products were the public switching exchanges (Linea UT), the trasmission equipments and a new radiomobile system.
Subsequently on the network, communications applications and methods (email, text phone, videotext ...) were made available for the "population" of some thousand of technical people, from the software developers to hardware and systems engineers to manufacturing technicians. The entire "vision" of the RCRS is represented with the "Roman Temple in fig. 1.
From an organizational point of view, Italtel provided itself of an important procedure: the "iter di Prodotto" (Product flow") providing the definitions of the different phases: marketing, Research and Development (SW & HW), manufacturing, deployment, and monitoring all phases via a particular Quality process. The RCRS intended to support all.
In this sense Italtel provided itself for the Technical Information System of a strong standard considering that in a distributed computing environment the importance of a common Relational Data Base Management System was superior to the standardization of a unique operating system platform.
Starting from the beginning of the 80's, the "standard" problem was fronted in three steps:
- first of all the network; we standardized in every Italtel site (from the biggest manufacturing plant to the commercial locations) the local area network. We chose Ethernet with particular attention to the cabling (not only old coax cable, plus AT&T Premise Distribution System for the shielded twisted pair and AT&T Industrial Distribution System for optical fibers). We considered, apart the technical point of view, that the physical infrastructure would have allowed and facilitated the changement in organization. The sites (five industrial sites, with a lot of buildings and some thousands of employees, and eighteen regional offices) were connected in a multiprotocol Wide Area Network.
- in the meantime, the platforms: Italtel is a full-line manufacturer of telecommunications products and in this field there was (and is) an obvious convergence with the Information Technology world. The result of this phenomenum for the internal infrastructure of information system is that we have to use a multisupplier environment in technical activities and particularly the most important computer suppliers. So in the beginning we had to manage and network the proprietary platforms (1983-1988) and next move toward de facto standard platforms.
At the time the situation is an integrated network between an IBM MVS mainframe, some DEC VAXclusters/VMS, some IBM AS400, a lot of UNIX systems and PC/Windows using IBM SNA, DEC DNA (both "frozen") and a very fast growing TCP/IP network: Italtel is a registered class-B domain in the N.I.C. from the 1988.
The commonality between different platforms was possible thorugh an internal made set of applications (hosted by a system called NEMO: NEtwork Master Observer) that allows the distributed generation of multiprotocol addresses and names of the node (both with an internal standard schema), with an authomatic nightly distribution of the entire network map to all the "site" main server.
The realization of the first two steps allowed, at the end of the 80's, to our thousands of users to remotely logon, transfer files, send/receive email to, from and between the 2000 nodes of different type inside the company.
- The third standardization efforts was to choose a common middleware (The Relational Data Base Manager System) available in a heterogeneus environment,with distributed databases connected via the protocols chosen on the network. The goal was to have the potential of sharing the data (the informations!) available in more applications generated in different departments in the company.
In fact, the centralized Technical Information System department cannot produce all the applications needed by users: standardizing the RDBMS, with a strong agreement with ORACLE, he can anyway link the data missing in the central warehouse.
We infact consider that people in the company that uses the Information Technology support are not only "users' of the centralized department, but partecipate actively to the realization of the Technical Information System. More, in our particular case, this phenomenum pushes the growing of the software knowledge of people, allowing new career opportunities inside the company and more basic capabilities in the development of the telecommunications products. The choice was ORACLE, initially v.6 and now we are moving to v.7 across the heterogeneus platforms.
In this way, we implement the global vision that the centralized Technical Information System department was (and always is) not able to develop and support all the applications required in the company, but the same can aggregate and "glue" data generated with locally developped applications.
In fact, while the centralized Technical I..S. developed applications like the bill of materiales, the archive of the certified components, the tracking of the plantfloor activities, we can "vampire" data from the CAD environment and "inject" other kins of data to the central EDP (which elaborates all the economics facts anf runs the MRP of all factories and products of the compay).
The final vision will show the company information archives gathered on centralized UNIX mainframes linked via the departmental server for upgrade and coherence.
Next big step will be the treatment and distribution of information ("not only data": images, technical drawings, documents, hypertextual links, rasterized images from external sources..) using Internet technologies (browsers, HTML, http,..)
Has your application helped
those it was designed to help? How has it affected them? What are its most
important benefits? What positive impact will your application have beyond its
immediate users? Will it change how others live And / Or work? How will it
impact society?
Also if not immediately valuable, we can consider three ways:
For the users: the realization of the first two steps allowed, at the end of the 80's, to our thousands of users to remotely logon, transfer files, send/receive email to, from and between the 2000 nodes of different type inside the company.
For the Technical Information System department: in this way, we implement the global vision that the centralized Technical Information System department was (and is) not able to develop and support all the applications required in the company, but the same can aggregate and "glue" data generated with locally developped applications.
For the company: not only was possible economics with a single contract with the supplier, but also was possilbe to move trained people from project to project and also inside the organization, reutilizing the common skills.
How did information technology
make this application possible? Describe any new technology used and/or cite
innovative uses of existing technology. For example, did you adapt an old
software program to solve a new problem? Or did you define a problem and develop
new technology to solve it?
Without the usage of computers and networks, it would be not be possible to reconvert the company from an electromechanical "culture" (and about 30.000 workers, with the 80% of blue collars) to a modern high tech company, leader in Italy in telecommunications manufacturing and with a complete calogue in public switching (Linea UT), transmission and mobile products.
Now the company is about 15000 workers, 3400 of them being highly qualified engineers, and with 9000 "access ponits" (terminals, PC, workstations) to common Information System network. In particular was possible to shorten the time to market for new products (data are available for the different types) and diversify them for the foreign markets.
Is your application unique? Is
it original? How? Is it the first, the only, the best or most effective
application of its kind? How did your application evolve? What is its
background?
The constitution of an integrated Information System cannot be considered of course "original", being this an effort of many companies.
Anyway we think that the differences in our cases are:
1) The period the project started: considering that in Italy technologies anf informations are not as soon availabale as. e.g, in the States, the longterm vision of our management is meaningful.
2) The technical environment: our users are not administrative people but very qualified technicians, most of them being involved in the I.T. world: notable is that Italtel is not an I.T. player.
3) We started not from the "applications" but from the common infrastructure: a very diffcult way to introduce I.T. without the immediate cognition of economical Return-on-Investment., but just betting on the "cultural" changes in our people.
Has your application achieved or
exceeded its goals? It it fully operational? How many people benefit from it?
Describe future plans for the project.
The R&D Computer Network was fully operational at end of 1989. Now it counts 4000 nodes (computers) of differnet type plus 2500 dumb terminals spread in all Italy and with the first implementation abroad (Russia).
The Technical Information System was ended in 1991: different functions (CAD, CAE, CAM and CIM, more the measuring of quality process) were affected also helping the Personnel Department in restructuring the organization.
The investments (summarized in the years, not actulaized) were about 40milions US$. In this phase an important success factor was the support of the top management.
From 1992 we started the riconversion towards a pure TCP/IP architecture using UNIX and Microsoft environment, continuing the usage of ORACLE. A big efforts from 1994 and still continuing is the usage of an intranet using the Internet technologies (WWW. HTML, http,..). We consider to have about 2000 internals "Internet-like" users at the end of 1997.
What were the most important
obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful?
Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational difficulties?
Technical difficulties were represented by the etherogenous environments offered by more suppliers.
Big organizational problems came from the need to match different requirement in the internal departments and managing the necessary agreement between them and the central organization.
Copyright 2001/2005 ICSline
Last updated: April 30, 1997