There has been a major trend away from custom designed programs develop by the professional programmers of the organization. Instead, the trend is toward the use of off-the-shelf software packages acquired by end users from software vendors.
The trend dramatically increased with the development of relatively inexpensive and easy to use application software package and multipurpose software suites for microcomputer.
The trend has accelerated, as software package are designed with Web-enabled networking capabilities and collaboration features that optimize their usefulness for end users and workgroups on the internet and corporate intranets and extranets.
Also many software packages can now be downloaded, update, managed, and rented or leased from software companies or application service providers over the internet and corporate intranets.
Also there has been a steady trend away from technical, machine specific programming languages using binary-based or symbolic codes or procedural languages, which use brief statements and mathematical expressions to specify the sequence of instruction a computer must perform.
Instead the trend is toward the use of a visual graphic interface for object oriented programming, or toward non procedural natural languages for programming, that are closed to human conversations.
This trend accelerated with the creation of easy to use, nonprocedural fourth generation languages. It continuous to grow as developments in object technology, graphics and artificial intelligence produce natural language and graphical user interfaces that makes both programming tools and software packages easier to use.
In addition, artificial intelligence features are built into many types of software packages. For examples, software suites provide intelligent help features called wizards that help to perform common software functions like graphing parts of spreadsheet or generating reports from a data base.
Other software packages use capabilities called intelligent agents to perform activities based in instructions from a user. For example, some electronic mail packages can use an intelligent agent capability to organize, send, and screen E-mail messages.
These major trends seem to be converging to produce a fifth generation of powerful, multipurpose, expert-assisted and web-enabled software packages with natural language and graphical interfaces to support the productivity and collaboration of both end users and IS professionals.
Software trends
