Some of my courses are about information management and information system (IMIS). Last week, the teacher of information system engineering gave us some homework, to design a kind of certain system. Afterward, we should write our gain and thought in an essay. I wrote one and half one page of words reaily.

The original version was writen in Chinese. Here I translated a paragraph: After last class, I thought what difference it was between software engineering and information system engineering, or why did ISE exist. Then I looked through some material and made a conclusion. Software engineering suits tech-insensive projects, while information system engineering suits data-insensive projects. Data-insensive projects is projects in BAT, for example. These three company have poor contribution on technology unlike Google and Microsoft, whose core is data. Baidu holds data of users’ search, Alibaba holds data of trade by sellers and buyers, and Tencent holds data of QQ users and their relation. They deal with the data through existing technology and make a profit from it. Even if you can get all of source code of theirs, you cannot set up a new company over them. Only software without data is nothing. Some first party people don’t know the theory even more than us developers. They just think code is everthing, which is compeletely wrong because data is more significant for a information system.