| This qualitative study investigates the problems associated with developing enterprise-level database systems. The enterprise database system of today's corporate environment typically encompasses what is coined as a global environment, but not necessarily so. Globalization, is the contemporary term for the phenomenon occurring in business today, and in fact for many years with migration of personnel positions, infrastructure, and finally more important to this paper, information. Information as defined by the Federal Trade Commission is a form of corporate currency, as it is the intellectual property of a number of parties; the original owners, customers and persons or entities providing the data, and the organization collecting, storing and most importantly trading in the information. The focus of this study is the gathering the experiences of senior professionals charged with the development of the design, storage and management systems at the back end system to protect this information; what is known as the Very Large Database (VLDB). Conducting a one-on-one analysis of a set of these professionals was deemed more valuable than a broad based study of those affected by identity theft, loss, fraud, intellectual property migration. The Information Systems industry is multi-tiered, as are many other business industries, making the population group studied rather small, as it is at the higher end of the overall population, some 1000's (Department of Labor, 2003) total to poll from, with not all available. Key groups, including the Information Technology Association of Southern Arizona, Unicode Consortium and the VLDB.org were selected for appropriate candidates. |
