Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions.
Figure B18.5 shows the three latencies that impact the speed of decision making. These are data, analysis, and decision latencies. Data latency is the time duration to make data ready for analysis, i.e., the time for extracting, transforming, and cleansing the data, and loading it into the database.
(1) In general, the period of time that one component in a system is spinning its wheels waiting for another component. Latency, therefore, is wasted time. For example, in accessing data on a disk, latency is defined as the time it takes to position the proper sector under the read/write head. (2) In networking, the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination. Together, latency and bandwidth define the speed and capacity of a network. (3) In VoIP terminology, latency refers to a delay in packet delivery. VoIP latency is a service issue that is usually based on physical distance, hops, or voice to data conversion.