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•Eight Greatest Computer Innovations that Actually Make Life Easier 81

engineering department of a local authority held a record of all the street furniture,
lampposts, benches and so on, in its area. To put these items on to a computer gave
the engineers a number of benefits. They could schedule maintenance and repair
schedules much more efficiently to make best use of resources and save manage-
ment time spent on that sort of activity. But the street furniture system had no
connection with, for example, the street opening (holes in the road) system.

As more and more systems were computerised, people began to see the need to
create reports based on data held in more than one application file. This gave birth
to the idea of a central database system.

In a central database system there are still the separate applications systems
such as accounts, stock and payroll, but the data for each is held centrally and the
individual systems dip into the database in order to process transactions. This leads,
at least in theory, to compatibility within systems, less duplication of data since each
item is held only once, and thus to more integrity of the data held.

On the other hand

This centralised data concept did not need computers for its implementation,
and could lead to two major problems.

1 A growing complexity of the holding of data with its attendant dangers of
introducing another set of individuals to look after the central data as well as
the application systems.

2 An increase in vulnerability. If all the data is in one place it is more vulner-
able to computer malfunction and corruption whether accidental or deliber-
ate.