Agriculture & Middle class Ministry  R&D Administration (DG6)	NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN of BELGIUM			National Botanic Garden
	Bad news
	Intro	Tutorials	Informatics

Bad news

• Exploding complexity of the personal Operating System
• Staff size
• during ten years (1982-1992), nobody was in charge of the information infrastructure (work done during 'some spare time' cut off the research duty).
• the year 1988 was introduced a network, a UNIX mini computer, a NOVELL server, more and more PCs.
• for years later (1992), a researcher (A.Empain) was detached to the full time duty of network and system management.
• we are facing now (1999) a real crisis.

A survey of similar institutions (public and private) shows that a team of 3 full-time specialists are needed to handle safely our information infrastructure. But we cannot afford to hire somebody else.


It implies that some trade-offs are needed to insure the integrity of the infrastructure :

• the priority is given to the collective aspects
• so, the individual requests are more and more difficult to be quickly satisfied (THE bad news)