Intelligent Enterprise

THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE WEBLOG

Blog Entries by Date

What's Your Opinion on Performance Management?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
2:36 PM

It's your last chance to "Take The Poll" on our home page (left column below the blog). I'm wrapping up this month's interactive poll on performance management and will post a new poll for May. So... Which of the following best describes your top performance management priority?

Continue reading "What's Your Opinion on Performance Management?"

Comments

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
12:00 PM

My assessment might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My last blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization's data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
3:43 PM

While many tout BI as a way of boosting profits, BI is increasingly going green as a way to promote sustainability and good corporate citizenship.

Under full disclosure here, I am thrilled that green is gaining ground! I am green, very green. Admittedly, I was not always so passionate about these topics. However, living in Switzerland for eight years forever changed my view of garbage. Indeed the Swiss have "garbage police" who will check your trash to ensure you are recycling and fine you if you're not recycling (I wish they'd visit NJ for a week!). As trash bags are expensive in Switzerland ($10 a bag, if I recall correctly), manufacturers package their consumer products frugally. You can buy milk and fabric softener in something like a ziploc bag, which creates less trash than big plastic cartons. For companies that don't package their goods so wisely, shoppers unwrap things at the supermarket and let the store deal with the unwanted packaging.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
12:06 AM

Cheers to Microsoft Labs for their release of Search Commands, an Office 2007 add-in that "helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in... Word, Excel, and PowerPoint." The embedded Guided Help calls it "a useful complement to the usual method of browsing for commands by clicking tabs on the Ribbon."

I'm all for a way to work around Office ribbons, a set of interface elements introduced in Office 2007 that I characterized last September as "visually unbalanced." Ribbons degrade Office usability. I wrote in September that "they force extra clicking around for routine work and make it hard to find less frequently used functions." Microsoft is now, essentially, pleading guilty. Search Commands' Guided Help, in addition to calling the awkward process of "browsing for commands by clicking tabs" a "usual method," says Search Commands is "especially useful for finding commands that you use less often."

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, April 28, 2008
9:14 AM

There has been a lot written about the suitability of relational databases in the ever-expanding Web world of text and pictures and video, even in Rajan Chandras' latest blog. Relational is given a lot of credit because of its staying power and incumbency, which is often confused with universal usefulness. But if you step back and think about it, there is nothing special about a relational database and in the world as we see it evolving, the physical structure, and even location of data, no longer matters. What made relational special was not the database, it was SQL itself.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, April 25, 2008
10:23 AM

Are Web 2.0 innovations (mashups, cloud computing, web communities, etc.) conspiring to bring about the downfall of the relational database (RDBMS) as we know and love it? Is that venerable technology — which proudly and successfully beat back energetic onslaughts from the likes of object and xml databases, document management solutions, and indeed the World Wide Web, that near—infinite hyperlinked information store — now reeling against the momentum of Web 2.0? Or, to paraphrase a popular quote, is the news of the conventional database's demise greatly exaggerated?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, April 24, 2008
2:53 PM

Adoption of text analytics has accelerated in the years I've followed the topic, with growth in expected and unexpected directions both. It wasn't hard to foresee extension of leading data mining workbenches to text, but I'll admit I had thought BI vendors would be much quicker to build handling of "unstructured information" into their technology stacks. (This lag has created partnering opportunities for a number of BI-focused text analytics companies. Business Objects' acquisition of Inxight and SAS's of Teragram show that the BI big guns are closing the gap.) And I didn't anticipate the nature of the solutions, other than semantically enhanced search and expansion in the legal, tax & regulatory (LTR) sector, that would be responsible for the greatest market growth. I'm referring to sectors such as media & publishing and applications including competitive intelligence and Voice of the Customer analytics supporting CRM, product management, and marketing.

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
8:39 AM

The state of information adequacy across business has never been worse. The percentage of IT budgets allocated to improving decision support and business intelligence for business and the underlying information management technologies is now a miniscule fraction of total spend by IT for business. Even worse, the time it takes to implement improvements is dire. The cycle time has gone beyond normal response and in many organizations can be measured in years. How is this possible? Well, IT is not spending enough time and resources on assessing the situation and has become fully out of touch with the user and functional requirements for information and process needs.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
5:32 PM

BI Scorecard author and IE blogger Cindi Howson writes that she "gasped" on hearing Jim Davis of SAS talk about the commoditization of BI. Yet I'm with Davis — BI softwareis a commodity — the technology, that is, and not BI as a whole. That "as a whole" includes extensions wrapped around the commoditized technology core, extensions that build-out common-place core BI into solutions, extensions that adapt the technology — that package it in suite or application or embedded form — and link it to information sources and presentation and, nowadays, decision management.

I wrote about BI's information angle in an earlier BI-market appraisal. I didn’t bother to take on BI technology as a commodity in that earlier article because the technology’s commodity status was almost self-evident to me. But to take it on now, I’ll cite what I wrote in a look at database management software. Condensing a bit:

So far as that functional core is concerned, 1) there's broad consensus on definitions, 2) basic interface standards are well established, 3) leading products are interchangeable, 4) vendors compete on extended or niche capabilities, and 5) vendors don't compete on software price. I'd further add that with a commodity there is no barrier to user entry-level adoption and there's similarly only a low entry barrier for a would-be technology provider.

This description fits BI technology. It fits reporting and OLAP and ETL from the leading BI firms. It explains why the innovation is outside these core areas, differentiated by (claiming) improvement on the commodity core.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
9:29 AM

Tired of giving up sales to upstart appliance vendors, Teradata yesterday announced its own lineup of appliances spanning data warehousing needs from departmental warehouses and analytic marts up to entry-level warehouses and large-scale enterprise-class warehouses.
The price-per-terabyte figures are newly aggressive for Teradata, the performance looks promising and, most important, they all run on the Teradata 12 database. That last point is crucial because most customers would rather not have to run multiple DBMS environments.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, April 21, 2008
11:28 PM

Perhaps you noticed that I renamed this blog "Competing on Decisions" from "Addicted to BI." Now I'll admit that the latter had a certain anti-chic appeal with its allusion to substance abuse, but frankly, I'm recovering from my BI addiction, so it's time to move on. I've also come (slowly it seems) to the conclusion that informing people (BI) is part of an incomplete cycle. If we as a company make an investment in BI, it isn't the informing of people that matters, it's what happens next. The decisions.

Last year, James Taylor and I wrote a book, "Smart (Enough) Systems," to make the case for creating "decision services" in order to automate certain kinds of high-volume, low-latency decisions. Dubbed EDM for enterprise decision management, we laid out the sort of reference architecture for getting this done, which included predictive modeling, business rules engines, some form of either process automation, or at least a smooth handoff to operational systems and back end analytics to both evaluate the quality to the decisions and manage some form of adaptive control of the decision models (in other words, test new models and compare to the results of the existing ones).

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, April 21, 2008
1:08 PM

We outsource manufacturing. We outsource services. Farming and mining already follow a natural global-sourcing model. Now, research says that we should outsource science too; it's good for American innovation. I guess the outsourcing genie is well and truly out of the bottle…

A recent article in the New York Times mentions research and researchers in American universities that have reached the conclusion that we have nothing to fear from the rise of science in low-cost countries like China and India. In fact, we should view this as an opportunity to "reduce the cost of producing new scientific discovery," which should help American innovation. In turn, this approach also decimates the theory that a shortage of US scientists will hamper American competitiveness.

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, April 18, 2008
9:55 AM

It wasn't so long ago that if you were considering a data warehouse, your choices for a relational database platform were limited to Oracle, IBM, Teradata or Microsoft. In fact, I often wondered where all the choices went. Fifteen years ago, that list would have included lots of other choices. There were standalone database vendors like Sybase (their transactional database that is now Sybase ASE; Sybase IQ was not out in circulation yet), Informix and Red Brick. Most of the hardware vendors had their own offerings, too. We built some pretty good data warehouses for the times with Tandem, but there were also offerings from Digital, HP, Pyramid and probably a few others I've forgotten.

Database choices are now back, and then some.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, April 17, 2008
9:14 AM

An HP Global Analyst Summit for the Technology Solutions Group (TSG) held in early April detailed the continuation of a transformation led by Mark Hurd, CEO, Ann Livermore, the head of TSG, and Tom Hogan, the top HP Software executive. The motivation for change is to be relevant in not just hardware, with servers, storage technology and related services and outsourcing aimed at helping CIOs to transform infrastructure to drive improvements in the efficiency of data centers. The question is how relevant HP Software will become in enterprises considering the growing role of enterprise software providers like IBM, Oracle, SAP and even Microsoft.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
5:32 PM

This week's in-depth story on "How to Choose Among the Four Bright Lights of BI" offers a good example of provocative story packaging meant to get people to click and read. This also happens to be the cover story of this week's issue of InformationWeek magazine. The cover line read "And Then There Were Four," and the cover image (also used on our home page) shows four brightly burning lights among a bunch of burned-out, broken and missing bulbs. That combo has succeeded in getting people to turn the page, but, ouch, it has to hurt if you're one of the leading lights among the remaining independent BI vendors.

I've been in publishing for a couple of decades, so I defend the right of writers and editors to stir emotions to get people reading, clicking and talking. Through acquisition, SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft now claim roughly half the existing BI installs out there, but there are plenty of other leading lights out there that will help define a bigger market that has yet to emerge.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
8:29 AM

Oracle announced on Monday that it is entering the archiving market with the release of "Universal Online Archive." UOA positions Oracle to compete more directly against EMC and IBM in the e-mail and messaging archive space. It's interesting as only a year ago nobody was much interested in archiving, but in the past twelve months we have seen everyone from Dell to Google try to gain a foothold, and the market shows no signs of slowing down. It remains a chaotic and confusing sector risking a consolidation (which of course might not happen, or at least not soon).

UOA is built on top of Oracle 11g with technology acquired from Stellent, as well as from e-mail capture experts ZL Technologies. Why would Oracle be interested in archiving e-mails you may ask? Well the answer is simple: because there is an awful lot of it. And by archiving it, the messages will move out of Microsoft's servers and into Oracle databases. Remember in most firms e-mail is by far the single largest type of "data."

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
11:50 AM

It seems my last post, drawn from a press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM's business process management suite announcement. Here is the decoded version.

The announcement of an "IBM BPM Suite" represents a big deal internally at IBM. It is intended to signify a commitment to a single BPMS based on interworking components from separate divisions — WebSphere, FileNet, Lotus, Rational, GBS, etc. It required signoff from all the various warlords — Rosamilia, Goyal, LeBlanc, Bowden, etc. They know they're not there yet, but the commitment to get there is new.

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
10:28 AM

Does program code entirely between curly braces {} ring any bells for you? Probably not. HTML lives between <> pairs, and LISP code (if you're old enough to remember it) was fully parenthesized (), but curly braces? This is the signature of a Web oriented language called Curl. That name you may have seen kicking around online literature. You'll see a lot more of it. As of this week, Curl is taking on Adobe AIR for the rich Internet application (RIA) Web/desktop application development market with a project named Nitro.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, April 14, 2008
1:38 PM

"Pinch me, I'm dreaming!" This is the line Salesforce.com is using to promote today's announcement of "Salesforce for Google Apps," a pairing of the software-as-a-service-based sales force automation offering with Google Apps. The New York Times had a scoop on the story this morning, and they pegged it with this quote from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend."

The enemy in question is Microsoft, of course, and Salesforce for Google Apps will be going up against Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The twist here is that Salesforce and Google say they'll be able to mash up their SaaS-based apps so you can, for example, keep track of e-mails sent (through Gmail) to a particular customer right on that customer's sales record...

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, April 14, 2008
9:05 AM

There were lots of provocative questions and comments on my previous two posts ("Technology is Not the Driver of BI Adoption" and "BI and Technology: Part II"), so I thought I'd just batch all my responses together.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, April 11, 2008
1:42 PM

Prediction markets are mathematically based but human powered, a tool for turning collective human insights into forecasts. The approach enables individuals to bet on ideas or events. Twists such as anonymous participation, restriction to experts, and pre-screening for character traits are designed to reduce bias and boost accuracy.

The New York Times reports that "companies use prediction markets to funnel ideas from the work force" (Betting to Improve the Odds, April 9, 2008). Steve Lohr's article provides illuminating examples from companies including Best Buy, InterContinental Hotels, and Hewlett-Packard. Lohr also notes, "for years, public prediction markets have been used for politics, where buyers and sellers bet on which candidate will win a particular race." It’s the kind of article that everyone interested in decision sciences should read, and then follow-up on to understand not only the mechanics of the techniques but also their limitations.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, April 11, 2008
11:47 AM

I attended IT360 this week, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It's a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn't need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we Canadians need to work on that "we're not worthy" attitude!

Google's Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps, which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, April 10, 2008
7:31 AM

I was recently at a SAS event in which Jim Davis, their Chief Marketing Officer, talked about the commoditization of BI. He described their sales efforts for these applications as low and the price sensitivity as high.

I gasped (silently of course), thinking of the many customers I speak to and work with who spend months evaluating software, sending vendors painfully detailed RFIs, and diligently conducting proof of concepts. Some of these customers already own BI tools or will evaluate tools despite what's being offered to them for free.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
12:29 PM

You're probably saying, "wait a minute, didn't IBM already have a business process management suite? Yes, I admit, they were in my 2006 BPMS Report series, in which they agreed (reluctantly, I hear) to let the combination of WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, WID, and Process Server be described as a BPM Suite. But here at IBM's Impact 2008 conference in Las Vegas, the company actually announced it has an orderable suite — sort of…

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
10:26 AM

Last week, Lombardi held its second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including growth — both new hires and through the channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about products and services.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
8:55 AM

We have space left in our two-day class Process Modeling with BPMN in Chicago on April 16-17. This is a great opportunity to jump-start your education on what has emerged as the important standard in BPM. The training is hosted by the BPM Institute and taught by me. This is the new v3.0 of the training material, based on BPMN 1.1, and includes 60 days use of what I think is the best BPMN tool around, Process Modeler for Visio from ITP Commerce. We use the tool for simple exercises in class, as well as for the certification exercises mailed in after class, with individualized feedback from me. That part is optional, but that's where you really learn how to do BPMN.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, April 7, 2008
1:05 PM

Judging by the fact that this article is among the top five on our site thus far this year, I know for a fact that database/data warehouse scalability is a hot topic with the readers of Intelligent Enterprise. With this in mind, I'm hosting a Web seminar tomorrow entitled "Database Scalability: How to Plan for the Long Haul." The star attraction is none other than database/data warehouse guru Richard Winter, principal of WinterCorp and director of the Winter TopTen program.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Monday, April 7, 2008
11:28 AM

The world does seem to love an XML fight. Last week, Microsoft scored a goal by getting its OOXML standard ratified as an international standard through ISO (International Organization for Standards) — a definite point score, since there were many other parties fighting tooth and nail to prevent this happening. OOXML is an important standard, with critical implications for the industry as a whole, and therefore represents a standard that we need to look at dispassionately to assess its true value and potential impact.

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, April 4, 2008
12:34 PM

Thanks to all of you who responded to my last post with thoughtful comments. Rather than respond to each in a Lincoln-Douglas style debate, as Kurt Schlegel suggested, let me shift the discussion a little. Instead of arguing that technology alone can't move BI along, I'd rather explore the issue of what can.

To be effective, BI has to focus on simplicity of operation to achieve pervasiveness in the organization and beyond it. The model is the Consumer Web, which provides only the necessary presentation to perform the tasks at hand, and relies on open standards and loosely coupled services to perform the functions, which can be reconfigured dynamically. In the same way the users of the Consumer Web are willing to pay little or nothing directly (except for purchases), the cost of BI has to drop drastically from expensive, front-loaded perpetual licenses to pay-as-you-go on demand schemes.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, April 3, 2008
10:39 AM

A couple recent news items find SAP and IBM both in a bit of legal hot water.

U.S.-based über-trash-collector Waste Management Inc. is suing SAP for a whopping $100 million, alleging that the ERP vendor demoed some very convincing vaporware, covering up a fundamental inability to meet stated requirements.

Meanwhile, IBM has been suspended from any new federal contracts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — an extraordinary, if likely temporary, measure — after some alleged hanky-panky involving a failed contract bid and aggressive appeal. There's talk of potential criminal investigations of both EPA and IBM employees.

I don't know how either of these disputes will turn out, but from the news reports alone they raise several important issues for technology customers working with large (I mean really large) vendors.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
1:40 PM

"If you're not relying on the twin pillars of regression analysis and random tests, you're making a big mistake." This was a key point delivered this morning at the Gartner BI Summit by keynoter Ian Ayres in his talk on "Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart." Drawing from his book "Super Crunchers," Ayres said random testing, in particular, is the best way to get into statistical algorithms, and he guaranteed the measure will give you "at least a 5 percent to 10 percent improvement in any measure you care about."

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
7:53 AM

So HP finally made a move into the world of Enterprise Content Management by acquiring Tower Software of Australia. On the surface it's an unusual match for HP, as many had expected them to buy one of the top tier players such as Interwoven, Vignetteor even Open Text, but on closer consideration it's a move that makes sense. Revealingly, HP does not call this an "ECM" deal and focuses on the e-discovery and compliance benefits from Tower's addition, so it's possible HP has further moves to make if it wants to get serious about offering broader ECM services à la IBM.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
12:24 AM

I'm here in Chicago at the Gartner BI Summit, but the opening keynote is still hours away. In the meantime, here are few tangential-but-nonetheless-interesting comments I edited out of my Q&A interview with Gartner's Kurt Schlegel. On the combination of BI and Search, for example, Schlegel admits there's much more potential than real adoption at this point. And on consolidation, he says visualization and predictive analytics technologies will be next on the acquisition hit list.

There was plenty of hype last year about making BI analysis Google easy, but I just haven't come across a lot of customer success stories. "I don't think [Business Objects] Polestar has any customers yet," says Schlegel, "and between FAST and Endeca, they may have a dozen or two customers. If you compare that to what's out there, it's a tiny fraction of the market."