12 Great Ideas From 2001

Respect for Privacy. Despite shifting wartime priorities, protecting customer privacy and ensuring individual ownership of data are still good ideas that companies can use to build better public images and brand awareness.

Web Services. Standards-based software components that interact over the Internet emerged as one of 2001's hottest technologies, with major vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun adding to the buzz.

Private, Vertical E-Marketplaces. While not quite moneymakers yet, e-marketplaces, such as Covisint LLC's automotive exchange, have enormous potential for streamlining supply chains in a variety of industries.

Yahoo Corporate Portals. As consumer online advertising revenues declined, Yahoo's newly hatched corporate arm forged portal technology partnerships with the likes of SAP Portals, Tibco Software Inc., and Novell Inc., and launched the promising Portal Builder 3.0 for the enterprise crew.

EbXML Engaged. EbXML is a global e-business standard with momentum, and the potential to unify many technologies and industries. EbXML enjoys the support of various international and U.S. standards groups and vendors, but faces many challenges on the road to universal e-commerce.

Pervasive Intelligence. Microsoft, PeopleSoft Inc., and Alphablox Corp. are among the vendors embedding sophisticated analytics in business applications. Having the tools at hand to quickly act on realtime BI is definitely a hallmark of the intelligent enterprise.

Content "Taxonomizers." Portals revealed vast secret troves of corporate documents and data, but once the floodgates of knowledge opened, the need for content categorization software quickly became apparent. Vendors came to the rescue with tools to organize documents into industry-specific, branching structures called taxonomies.

Google. Google continues to amaze its many fans by crawling billions of Web pages, searching the most file formats and languages, and with features such as wireless access and page caching (particularly useful after the September 11th terrorist attacks when CNN.com and other sites got swamped).

Disaster Recovery Strategies. Life during wartime drastically changes the climate for most companies with evacuations, supply chain disruptions, and business interruptions destabilizing enterprises already shaky from economic declines. Quiet heroes are already devising creative ways to protect employees, resources, and assets.

Sharing Information. From supply chains to security safeguards, there have never been more compelling reasons to share all kinds of information, both internally and externally, in order to create what Forrester Research calls a "dynamic collaboration" environment for organizational and B2B success.

Enriching BI. Companies like IBM are spending billions to develop technology to mine data from unstructured text, image, and multimedia files so that organizations can apply this knowledge to BI more effectively. Analysts predict growing demand for unstructured content management tools.

Enterprise Performance Management (PM). Deploying PM as part of a BI competency strategy to enhance collaborative supply chain performance, e-commerce, and overall enterprise strength and agility earned high marks from analysts.

— Claudia Willen

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