Summer ReadingA few thoughts inspired by the heatHot weather tends to set the mind adrift. That's the principal reason summertime is the traditional season for vacations, mystery novels, and bad movies. However, like a free-floating iceberg, a drifting imagination can also hit upon things it might not otherwise encounter. Here are five random thoughts that my brain, freed from its moorings (not literally, thank goodness) by sweltering heat, hit upon recently: The expectations game: IA-64 won't change the world, but it will change the landscape for strategic business applications. Sure, the first member of Intel's IA-64 Itanium family (codename Merced), which was released in Q3 2001, failed miserably to live up to expectations. But what other outcome was possible, given that much of the Western world misinterpreted Intel's goal as the wholesale replacement of RISC processor-based boxes, regardless of the application involved? As Mike Fister, Intel's senior vice president for enterprise platforms, told me just prior to Merced's launch (and I take him at his word), the premise of the IA-64 family is to give customers an "evolution path" toward better price performance, just as Intel did with IA-32. By late next year, the convergence of hardware platform, OS, and software support for the new member of the family, Itanium 2, will not only make new strategic business apps more attractive but also more common. The hype-meter is in the red: Business performance management (BPM) is not the killer BI app that the vendors think it is. I've polled independent experts on this subject far and wide, and I bring you this news: BPM is a business problem, not a technology problem that can be solved by business intelligence (BI) or analytic tools. As one expert observer recently explained, "management" is far outside the purview of BI; the best that you can hope to achieve with such products is "measurement." Does that make BI software companies jumping on the BPM solutions bandwagon disingenuous? You decide. With apologies to the National Rifle Association: Poor financial information management doesn't kill companies; people do. On a related subject, there's no question that increased regulation, as well as more board oversight, will stimulate the demand for financial modeling and reporting tools. But to expect the current problems to disappear because the CFO's team has access to such tools would be naive; I have every confidence that Enron's finance department has some of the best technology out there. (I don't expect to see that company in any testimonials, however.) The New Economy lives: Netflix may be the next Amazon; nobody does customer-focused e-commerce better. I've been a customer for years, and I've never observed more attention to the development of a long-term relationship. (Netflix communicates with me better than many of my close relatives.) Let's just hope it sticks to its simple, focused business model and doesn't go into the grocery delivery business. Strategic weapon: Fifteen months ago, many national security and law enforcement agencies lacked even garden-variety, passive search engine technology. Now, we're told that the U.S. Defense Department has established an Information Awareness Office ("The key to fighting terrorism is information," its background white paper says), which is dedicated to creating IT "intelligence infrastructure" across the homeland security apparatus. Work at the legendary Bletchley Park cryptanalysis center during WWII laid the foundation for modern computing. Will the initiative I just described open the frontier for a new era in data mining? We'll see.
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