Understanding the drawbacks of traditional data collection systems

As previously described, the proliferation of data began in the early 1980s due to the rapid adoption of computer workstations within organizations. Material requirements planning (MRP) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems came onto the scene and provided significant business value to organizations needing to centrally manage day-to-day operations. These systems used a database developed to house data flowing through the systems and then archived this when no longer relevant. Word processing and spreadsheet applications also helped organizations to create documents outlining planning, budgeting, financial, and other types of details about the company.

If we examine these systems more closely, we can see that they were severely limited by the compute resources available to run efficiently on the hardware they were deployed to. Also, the limitations of the software compilers and languages these systems were...