Intelligent Enterprise

The whole issue of E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) has come under the spotlight recently, triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco — a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." Plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees — text messages that were held by a hosted vendor, Arch Wireless — that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words, even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

Did you notice the new video player (top right) on our home page? This isn't just a new user interface, it's connected to a new video delivery infrastructure for TechWeb (the parent company of IntelligentEnterprise.com). This service, from an outfit called Brightcove, brings you a higher-quality viewing experience as well as faster and easier control over what you're watching.

I've sometimes gritted my teeth as TechWeb (formerly CMP) has evolved its video capabilities over the last few years. Do you remember "The News Show" with John Soat? That was our first foray into video, and I managed to contribute about a dozen segments to that show before we moved on to the next-generation initiative. Many people loved that daily program, but what people don't like, regardless of the content, is the push approach in which videos automatically start playing with audio on. This new player puts all the control in your hands. There's still room for improvement (we could use longer descriptive headlines, for example), but I think we're getting better and better at delivering thoughtful and informative content in video form. With this is mind, I thought I'd share my top-five list of IE-reader-relevant videos:

Yesterday, Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to business process management suites (BPMS).

To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can. The BEA installed base was reassured that all BEA current products would continue to be "supported," although those that are not "strategic" would not be enhanced.

I was at last week's Open Source BI Summit hosted by Sun and it was interesting to see a presentation by Mark Madsen asserting that Open Source is taking hold due to the commoditization of software in the market. Using BI as one example that has hit the mainstream and peaked, his observation is that Open Source is spawning more rapidly as the commercial on-premise software is generally the same across BI vendors. Let me take the contrarian position. Maybe a lot of core BI functionality is similar, but a lot of other capabilities are still very different.

Last week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to Procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular. Though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US-based Enterprise Content Management systems integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points:

• Never buy at the end of a quarter
• Avoid Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs)

I have created a short survey for users and consultants on Voice of the Customer (VoC) text analytics best practices. There are seven questions plus a comment field. The survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete. If you are involved with VoC text analytics or are looking at solutions for possible adoption, please respond to the survey at --

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HyhmPOYKhh8BcDeC_2b1Im5A_3d_3d

I'll publish results at a later date. Thanks!

There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

Fujitsu is releasing version 10 of its Interstage BPM, and I had a chance for an in-depth demo a few weeks ago in advance of the recent announcement. On the design side, their new version of Studio now allows business analysts and IT to work together, and it includes forms development. In terms of end-user functionality, there have been improvements to workflow to enable collaboration and new dashboard functionality. Most exciting, I think, is full support for multi-tenanting to allow for shared services and SaaS.

The most interesting keynote at last week's Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent Web developers and power users. The platform is 100 percent Web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user). You can define data, forms, and perform the usual set of database operations, so it's really easy to build a database app in the cloud.

Here's a clever video from Norway (by way of AIIM's Information Zen site) that reminds us that fear of new technology dates back to the transition from scrolls to books. In fact, there's little doubt that earlier collaborators resisted the move from tablets to scrolls. But who knew there were help desks way back when? Enjoy...

Homeowners know that installing energy-efficient windows helps save money in the long run, yet many are reluctant to make the investment in these challenging times. Businesses are no different, but even in this difficult economy, companies looking to optimize business processes have a very useful yet inexpensive tool at hand. It's called the Hawthorne Effect...

E-discovery and auditing are flip sides of a single coin, the one concerned with retention of records and their production in litigation, the other with studying records to verify the correct of execution of corporate business processes and accounting procedures. Extending the metaphor, compliance is the coin standing on edge: neither anticipation and response to litigation (e-discovery) nor historical analysis (auditing) but rather operational rules and monitoring designed to ensure that businesses stay out of legal and accounting trouble.

Last week we read about yet another major financial scandal allegedly exposed through the discovery of an e-mail message from a fund principal that apparently stated that their fund was going to be "toast."

The first thing I thought about this was that (if true) it was a fantastically stupid communication to put in an e-mail exchange. Secondly, I wondered why it took so long to find this e-mail — surely such high-profile financial managers would have their e-mail exchanges monitored automatically and an exchange like this should have rung every major alarm bell in the firm within seconds. Of course they could have been using an external system to get around that; we don't know at present. But this case once more highlights the limitations of e-mail monitoring (recently discussed here) and e-discovery, and conversely the value of content archiving.

Others have reported on this year's Text Analytics Summit: the prevalence of Voice of the {customer | Market | Patient} as a theme, the focus on sentiment analysis and on BI integration, the vendor announcements, applications for analysis of social media data, and so on. This commentary is helpful so I'll link to it in this article, and I have additional observations to share, drawn from summit discussions, concerning the evolution of the text-analytics market.

Did you know Adobe had a business process management suite (BPMS)? Most people don't, even though with more than 5,000 customers they could be considered a major player. One reason people don't know about Adobe and BPM is that the company doesn't talk about it in the usual way. In fact, it treats the normal catalog of BPMS features and functions, like workflow and integration adapters, as commodities. For example, Adobe includes process modeling and a workflow engine inside every copy of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, although to get full human task support you need to get the Process Management ES component as well.

I have to comment on my colleague Doug Henschen's article, "Is Social Networking KM All Over Again?" Doug did right at the Enterprise 2.0 conference to focus on cloud computing, a much more appropriate topic for enterprises than social networking. From the corporate perspective, the "cloud" is a diverse source of information, including all kinds of social and traditional media, out there to be searched and filtered for exploitable enterprise-relevant nuggets. But precipitous enterprise adoption of social networking? That would be foolish, destructive and not just disruptive. Corporations rely on and benefit from hierarchies and restricted lines of communications. Being selectively anti-social, for corporations, is a good thing.

It seems obvious that enterprise IT shops take Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 with a large grain of salt. It isn't that managers don't listen to enthusiastic developers or ignore the industry hype. However, most of them are in the business of insuring the cart stays behind the horse – the horse being the enterprise's existing servers, data systems, and applications. Most of the big players in Web 2.0 for the enterprise get this. They carefully position their enterprise RIA/Web 2.0 technologies and products near the margin – an add-on, a pilot for a new direction, nothing too radical. That's essentially what IBM is doing with mashups, Microsoft is doing with Silverlight, and Adobe is doing with its newest release of LiveCycle ES – Update 1.