Give Me Visibility!

Amid an information overload, decision makers need solutions that cut through the fog

By David Stodder

Miles Davis turned the world of jazz on a dime. In the late 1940s, the dense, fluid bebop arrangements of saxophonist Charlie Parker and his followers were in full flower. But the rushing melodies were becoming so packed with notes that many listeners were getting winded; they yearned for something clearer and simpler. Davis, who came of age in Parker's band, broke away to develop a spare, "cool" jazz style that eventually overtook bebop. His secret was that the notes he didn't play were as important as those he did play. Like great composers before him, Davis toyed with his listeners' aural pattern recognition to suggest, cajole, and give dimension to his musical vision. He was a sorcerer, in touch with the "negative" space that silently gives context to what our senses perceive.

I certainly mean no disrespect to Parker's legacy, dearest jazz fans in our Intelligent Enterprise audience. He was a revolutionary genius; he challenged the musical world. However, to push my analogy into our IT-driven business arena, I wonder if the revolutionary "new" economy similarly pushed the limits of how much information decision makers could process - and how many new "patterns," a.k.a. business processes, C-level business executives could comprehend. The mushroom of hype kicked up by market researchers, securities analysts, and the press certainly added noise and obscured reality. To weave through the dense rush of good, bad, critical, and inflated information, executives begged for - more information. For most, it's evident that this cacophony did not bring them close to the clear, simple essence they needed to guide their decisions.

As 2001 progresses, more and more companies, particularly in the high-tech industry, are announcing poor earnings. Just when investors think they've found the bottom, more sour news arrives. Cisco CEO John Chambers, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and a parade of other executives admit to having been blindsided by the depth and rapidity with which business fell off. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's hard to figure how they could not have seen the dot-com bubble bursting. With all the information available to them - as billionaire leaders of the information revolution, no less - how could they not have identified cresting demand and predicted the very moment when the party would be over?

Efficiency: High Tech's Turn

Press reports have quoted Ellison and other CEOs as saying they have "no visibility" into the future: They will "recover when the economy recovers." It seems that reports of the business cycle's death were greatly exaggerated. Whether we are merely surfing out the dot-com blowout or picking our way through a full-blown recession, only time will tell. From telecom and fiber optics to WAP phones and enterprise systems, the glut of unused technology is real and must be absorbed. The only thing that seems to have dried up is money. Great ideas will have to succeed the hard way; venture capitalists are still licking their dot-com wounds.

Recessions expose weaknesses in business efficiency. In the early 1990s, the U.S. downturn fed the business process reengineering revolution, which built upon the adoration of Japanese business practices and a decade of difficult progress toward manufacturing efficiency. ERP systems began their heyday. Globalization, demand planning, and supply chain management grew out of the next lull, before the Internet explosion really took hold. What new solutions to inefficiency will our current troubles forge? Well, if the glut in high technology got us into this mess, it would make sense that the seeds of innovation will take root in this industry sector. But can high-tech grow out of its cowboy legacy and truly embrace efficiency? And what exactly needs to be made more efficient?

High-tech leaders could begin by listening to some Miles Davis. Businesses are awash in information, and there's more on the way. Intelligent enterprises of the future will pull realtime data from sensors in process manufacturing, supply chains, and perhaps even retail stores (behavioral data, beyond the already massive amount of transaction data delivered by point-of-sale systems). The information flow, coming from an armada of enterprise systems, will feed a compressed lifecycle driven faster and faster by the business need to hit pay dirt as profit margins per transaction tighten.

Collaboration among applications, systems, and both automated and human decision makers will become mission-critical. The high-tech industry has responded with an explosion of enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, B2B solutions, and a good joke about what's so great about industry standards: so many to choose from. The cowboy youth of the industry emphasized personal productivity; integration and collaboration were matters that concerned mature, "legacy" systems. How will the high-tech industry help its customers - and itself - address the essential role of collaboration?

Ruling by Exception

Hand-in-hand with collaboration is better decision making. The information lifecycle will push decision makers at all levels to act fast and intelligently. Data warehousing has taken us part of the way, but the prize for the next killer app won't be given to the software developer who delivers more information. What businesses ultimately need is an intelligent solution that can speed up decision-making by touching less information - and, like Miles Davis, conjure up a fuller dimension by means of pattern recognition and knowledge of business rules and processes.

C-level executives certainly need this kind of business intelligence (BI) power, but those who need it most are decision makers who manage all the stuff the high-tech revolution has given them, including enterprise applications, distributed systems, B2B supply chains, and e-commerce systems. BI tool vendors have been successful in pushing reporting and OLAP analysis out to a wider range of users. The next wave will have to deliver richer, more dynamic decision-making solutions that can notify users of exceptions to pre-determined metrics and give them the tools to respond immediately.

Proper response requires attention: And the polite and meaningful way to get attention is usually through permission. Amid a fast-moving information cacophony, we all lose the ability to pay attention. Something tells me that our current privacy debates could be a fertile ground for new, intelligent solutions that go beyond producing better marketing pitches to customers.

To pull out of its economic doldrums, the high-tech industry needs to bring greater efficiency to its own decision making - an effort that will return value to all industries, thanks to our IT-driven world. Perhaps it will be the "visibility" revolution since that's what seems most lacking right now.