The Information Utility: a project retrospective

The Information Utility was a large research and development project in a medium-sized company. The project encompassed a number of very challenging problems central to the information industry, e.g. libraries. In this project, in this environment, the technical challenges were overshadowed by the philosophical changes required within the company itself. The question of when or whether to move out of a proprietary hardware product environment was central to many of the problems and is faced by other small or medium-sized companies with similar approaches. The paper examines the technical challenges faced by the project in light of this environment. Although this is an example from a single project, similar problems arise in many different projects and companies