Online and On Target

As the appellation suggests, one of the hallmarks of an intelligent enterprise is its tendency to endow business processes with the mechanisms of "awareness" in order to sense and respond to environmental changes. In other words, intelligent organizations, like organisms, have pervasive nervous system tendrils that keep the central processing apparatus constantly aware of fluctuating circumstances in the outside world, as well as the means of understanding and reacting to them.

That idea is taking hold. The recently announced merger between NetIQ Corp., an infrastructure operations management company specializing in internal Windows-based systems, and WebTrends Corp., a pioneering Web reporting and analysis vendor, suggests a significant new opportunity for solutions providers: the marriage of infrastructure administration and analytics.

In the wake of this $1 billion deal, which was barely noted by the mainstream business press, NetIQ will use WebTrends e-customer behavior analysis technology not only for the tactical purpose of extending its reach beyond the corporate firewall to Web-based applications, but also for the strategic purpose of enabling solutions that span systems administration, security, Web performance management, and e-business reporting and analytics.

In my view, this merger should inspire other players in the discrete Web reporting and Web performance management segments to seek either partners or acquisitions of their own. It makes perfect sense for e-businesses to correlate Web site performance and monitoring statistics with information about how visitors interact with customer-facing systems; each type of information has limited usefulness outside that context.

For example, although it's nice to know at what times of the day your Web-site traffic peaks, it would be even more useful - and perhaps business-critical, at some point in the near future - to know things like exactly which kinds of transactions occur during those periods, where most of the customers are coming from, and how many of them are repeat visitors. And ensuring that your servers are operating at peak efficiency during those periods to ensure a "pleasant" customer experience is pretty much a no-brainer, too.

Change Agent

It's my pleasure to report a valuable addition to Intelligent Enterprise's lineup of contributing editors: Beginning with this issue, author and consultant Don Tapscott will be penning a regular column called Change Agent.

Don is an expert on the impact of IT on business models and processes. You may recall his 1993 book Paradigm Shift (coauthored with Art Caston), which chronicled the business impact of the client/server revolution, and its follow-up about the even greater influence of Internet-based computing, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1997). His latest book (in collaboration with David Ticoll and Alex Lowy), Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs (2000), is a rumination about how extended, intelligent enterprises such as Dell Computer Corp., Cisco Systems, and Charles Schwab - or "business webs," as the authors call them - are transforming the traditional supply chain (whether involving goods or services) into something that hardly resembles a "chain" at all.

In Change Agent, which will appear in every other issue of Intelligent Enterprise, Don will help you focus on the challenges and opportunities that you may otherwise miss in the "fog of war": the continuous, tumultuous change that can keep even the most visionary IT and business leaders off balance. (For example, in this issue, he heralds the impending "hypernet," or wireless business Internet.) I hope you enjoy it.