Intelligent Enterprise

THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE WEBLOG

Blog Entries by Date

Avoid End-of-Quarter Buying and ELAs

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Monday, June 30, 2008
9:32 AM

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)

Continue reading "Avoid End-of-Quarter Buying and ELAs"

Comments

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, June 26, 2008
7:42 PM

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!

Posted by Kas Thomas
Thursday, June 26, 2008
6:01 AM

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:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
6:33 PM

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.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
9:32 AM

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.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
6:53 PM

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...

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
6:24 PM

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...

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
5:57 AM

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.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Monday, June 23, 2008
2:23 PM

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.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, June 20, 2008
4:50 PM

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.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Friday, June 20, 2008
9:33 AM

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.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, June 19, 2008
10:18 AM

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.

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, June 19, 2008
9:39 AM

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.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
6:33 PM

Last week I shared a post about an AIIM study that revealed (among many points) that receptivity to Web 2.0-style social networking is highest among "Knowledge Management-Inclined" organizations. The study didn't say what percentage of firms fit that description, so I tried to get in touch with one of the report authors to find out. As an experiment, I tried Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools for this bit of collaboration, and good old e-mail, a decidedly Web 1.0 tool, won the race.

I wouldn't have thought of this experiment had I not been practically goaded into it. You see, AIIM's Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen had this Odd Couple repartee going throughout their presentation. Wearing a suit and tie, Carl said, "As a Baby Boomer, I have very carefully established, serious online communities where we can collaborate… but you can also reach me via email."

Dan, wearing an un-tucked shirt and jeans, said, "I’m a Millennial… If you insist, I suppose I will take an e-mail address from you, but I'd rather that you use Twitter."

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
9:37 AM

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 event, Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or "a-ha", moment. It's like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you're twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):

Posted by Shawn Shell
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
9:40 AM

In one of my university political science classes, we had to read and review a now-famous essay by Francis Fukuyama titled "The End of History?" In the essay, Fukuyama argued that the apparent victory of modern liberal democracy over totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Cold War effectively marked the end of the ideological evolution of forms of government.

As I speak with more and more clients, I'm struck by the parallel between the essay's main argument and SharePoint (don't laugh... there's more). In much the same way Fukuyama suggests a resolved debate on forms of effective government, SharePoint seems to have halted virtually every conversation about alternate portal technologies. When speaking with my colleagues, Steve Krol, Exec VP of Services at Lyons Consulting Group, and Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, it seems they're seeing much the same thing. In fact, Steve went as far as to compare SharePoint to Kleenex, Band Aid, and Xerox — no one installs "portals" anymore, they install "SharePoint." This begs the question: does SharePoint represent the end-all of portal products?

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, June 16, 2008
8:40 AM

BIScorecard just posted an evaluation of QlikTech's QlikView, and I confess, this review has befuddled me more than others.

The challenge with new and emerging technologies is in trying to figure out where they fit and whether or not they really are that different. So I find myself thinking about cars and bikes and QlikTech.

When cars first came on the scene, bike enthusiasts were disgusted with those smoke-spewing machines that suddenly stopped working when cars ran out of gas (interesting that bikes are making a comeback in some cities). Sometimes innovations call for new evaluation criteria — with bikes and cars, features like pedals and gears simply don't translate against miles per gallon. So does "in-memory" BI make criteria like SQL-generation less relevant? Why do you need a data warehouse at all if you can load a full Terabyte of data in-memory?

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, June 13, 2008
2:28 PM

For those who've read my first post on The Challenge of Mobile Analytics, if you are hoping for a silver-bullet solution that will give you razor-sharp accuracy and provide more robust metrics than the "traditional" vendors, you may be disappointed.

To recap: some new analytics vendors market themselves as purveyors of mobile analytics, both from a branding perspective and because they have clearly committed to figuring out how best to capture and report on mobile Web data. Meanwhile, traditional online analytics vendors haven't been as aggressive in this area. However, this doesn't mean that the mobile analytics vendors have necessarily come up with great solutions either. Right now, it seems the mobile-oriented players exceed the online analytics vendors in their integration of WURFL data as part of the service or software, usually enhanced with DeviceAtlas (which is considered to have a more current database than WURFL for phone and manufacturer information).

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, June 12, 2008
5:53 PM

I didn't attend this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference (E2C) to spend lots of time hearing about wikis, blogs, bookmarking, expertise discovery and so on (I focused instead on cloud computing). I think social networking technologies are reaching maturity, and now that the likes of IBM and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft and (to an even lesser extent) Oracle are onto the most proven and popular capabilities, this is looking like another market set for consolidation.

Yes, pioneers and best-of-breed players will continue to innovate, and, yes, adoption will continue to grow. As evidence, there were plenty of success-story presentations at E2C from blue-chip outfits ranging from the CIA and Sony to Pfizer and Wachovia. So my question is, what's the next chapter?

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, June 12, 2008
11:00 AM

The need for business intelligence (BI) is evident, but most business organizations still don't have the information or insights needed to improve their decision making. The debate rages on: has IT been delivering BI effectively or does the responsibility lie within business? My recent blog, "Why Business Should Be Mad as Hell at IT," injected the frustration of business on this topic into the debate, and it generated some hearty discussion on who is responsible and why both IT and business don't work more closely together.

Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce costs and resources in IT has impacted many organizations' ability to dedicate further attention to BI. The reality is that each organization will have to determine how IT should prioritize budgets and resources for BI and how to respond to this growing need. Business knows the problems quite well, and limitations of existing BI efforts has proliferated further spreadsheet use. And as we all know, the copy and paste function of spreadsheets leads to inaccuracy and hampers quality decision-making.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
11:17 AM

One of the keynotes at the Enterprise 2.0 conference featured a couple of guys from the CIA discussing the Intellipedia project to create an internal wiki shared by the entire U.S. national intelligence community.

They shared many good nuggets about overcoming institutional and cultural resistance. (My favorite line, "in our work, 'collaborator' has a very different connotation.")

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
11:05 AM

I had a great one-hour session here with Jeff Schick, VP of social networking at IBM, and Joan DiMicco who came to IBM after doing media studies at MIT and is one of the key people behind Beehive. There were only seven of us plus these two quite technical IBM'ers in a suite upstairs in the hotel, giving us an opportunity to have an informal roundtable discussion: a sort of social networking nerd heaven.

We started out with a discussion about Beehive — a sort of enterprise Facebook that IBM has developed for internal use — which has gained 33,000 users in less than a year since internal release. That's 10% of IBM's workforce, which is a pretty significant adoption rate considering that it's not optional for creating any sort of work product. Beehive is purely a social platform, not a work platform, to allow IBM employees to create social and personal connections. I have friends within IBM, mostly former FileNet people who were absorbed during the acquisition, and one of them speaks glowingly of Beehive as a way to find other people with similar interests to her in order to find people whom with to collaborate.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
10:46 AM

Will large enterprises embrace cloud computing? A telling point during an "Evening in the Cloud" panel discussion at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference came when a member of the audience (an employee of integrator CSC) said, "I know of plenty of European companies that wouldn't touch you guys with a ten-foot pole if it means putting data in an American data center. The "you guys" in question were the executives representing Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. The objection cited was the Patriot Act, which has stoked plenty of fear about U.S. Government meddling in private data, but let's not get side-tracked on that issue. The point is that there are plenty of reasons why corporations won't move into the cloud until they can know more about where the data will reside and how it will be protected.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
12:19 PM

The Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off yesterday with some workshops, but I just flew in this morning and am at my first session of the day (although not the first session of the day), a keynote by Google's Rishi Chandra on cloud computing. The same key message (buy lots of Google cloud computing) but some complementary points to the presentation I saw by Matthew Glotzbach at IT360 a couple of months ago; considering that they're both in product marketing for Google Enterprise, that's not surprising.

The focus of the presentation is cloud computing and how the trends in consumer applications are starting to bleed over into the enterprise world. Chandra discussed four trends that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing among enterprises:

Posted by Tony Byrne
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
7:29 AM

Yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference we were treated to a series of semi-structured Social Software demos pitting IBM (Connections) against Microsoft (SharePoint), all moderated by Mike Gotta of the Burton Group.

Interestingly, both vendors pushed the portal angle: IBM bringing WebSphere Portal Server into play (partly as a container to mix in its quite separate collaboration tool, Quickr) and Microsoft showing off various 3rd-party Web Parts that can compensate for the dearth of native Social Networking services in Sharepoint.

Posted by Shawn Shell
Monday, June 9, 2008
3:53 PM

Microsoft recently announced the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (v1.2). This announcement is significant in that, among specific improvements in and to "out-of-the-box" projects, Redmond has added support for Visual Studio 2008. For those of you actively developing on SharePoint, this update to the extensions means, among other things:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Monday, June 9, 2008
10:16 AM

Almost two years ago, I reported on the IBM acquisition of FileNet, wherein I quoted their plan to "integrate IBM's BPM and SOA technologies with the FileNet platform." I interpreted this to mean that FileNet BPM could finally get separated from its document-centric chains, and become the product that it should have been years ago. Just as Jessica Rabbit said "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way," the FileNet BPM wasn't (isn't) document-centric, it's just marketed that way.

As the former director of e-business evangelism for FileNet in 2000-1 when they were launching this generation of the BPM product, I had some idea of what I was talking about — I saw that 40% of the BPM installations in some countries did not involve documents at all, and that this was due to the local sales and marketing messages and techniques rather than any inherently different BPM requirements between countries. So several years after I left FileNet, when the acquisition occurred and I saw that initial press release, I imagined that the best possible thing would be if the BPM product were to be separated out and made part of the IBM WebSphere suite, in order to flesh out the badly-needed human-facing workflow side of things over there. I realized that would mean some major surgery on the product, but a stronger unified BPM suite would emerge from that.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, June 6, 2008
10:35 AM

Bank of New York Mellon recently reported the loss of back-up tapes. True, the breach might jeopardize about 4.5 million people nationwide, but there's nothing to worry about... only about 500,000 persons are directly affected. Also, the backup tapes weren't encrypted, but there's no cause for concern — the tapes only had a few trivial details like names, bank account numbers, social security numbers, net worth and financial transaction histories. And yes, company officials did hide this breach from us for a full two months, but it's clear that they care: for the lifelong loss of their identity, customers will be offered two full years (no less!) of free credit monitoring, $25,000 worth of identity theft insurance (now you know what your identity is worth) and "credit freeze benefits" (why didn't someone tell me earlier that getting my credit frozen is actually a benefit?).

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, June 6, 2008
9:49 AM

This week at Informatica's annual user conference in Las Vegas, they announced their role in the information economy that spans from their historical focus on enterprise to a new focus of supporting specific data integration needs of outsourcing, software as a services (SaaS) and business to business (B2B) markets. Informatica has created specific divisions to organizationally advance new products to meet specific needs of these markets. Informatica has a vision for providing data integration across geographic and business boundaries and down to the desktop. Informatica hopes to be the key provider of technology for enabling information management across and inside businesses and industries.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, June 5, 2008
10:45 AM

I've been very impressed by ParAccel, a company that has lived up to their Intelligent Enterprise designation as a Company to Watch. They sell a columnar, MPP DBMS that has won strong market visibility in the two years since the company's founding. The industry experience of ParAccel executives, gained at companies including Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, and DATAllegro, surely plays a part in the company's success, and so must two technology antecedents: an earlier columnar DBMS, Clareos, and the PostgreSQL open-source RDBMS.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, June 5, 2008
9:50 AM

I see my friend Jesper is moving on from BEA, so the reality of the Oracle acquisition is finally sinking in. When I hear people say that Oracle bought BEA for their BPM, I have to laugh. I'm fairly confident the Oracle crew that went after BEA could not even spell BPM. But no doubt the two BPMSs will have to be merged or rationalized somehow into a single primary offering (although IBM/FileNet provides an example of how that can be dragged out for years). I don't actually know what Oracle's plans are, and they haven't solicited my opinion — you can be sure that if they had, I would not be writing about it. But I have thought a bit about what they ought to do.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
4:40 PM

I attended the Information Builders annual conference this week where they entertained over 1,100 customers from across the world. Information Builders announced and demonstrated their predictive analytics tool called RStat, which is built on top of the R open source project. The movement to provide deeper analytics has been evolving over the last decade and this year we have already seen new industry partnerships focused on predictive analytics including SAS and Teradata along with SPSS and Cognos. These partnerships have promised future new versions of existing products that will integrate together.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
12:17 PM

Some of the most interesting BI innovation of recent days has come from a, well, likely source: insiders itching for another go at BI, a chance to (re-)do it right. Ward Yaternick is a case in point. Ward led Cognos development teams, with lead responsibility for the PowerPlay OLAP engine. He created OLAP@Work, an Excel add-in to access Microsoft OLAP Services that he subsequently sold to Business Objects. Ward has been building a new company/product, nextanalytics, that unquestionably represents a fresh take on BI. Ward believes nextanalytics is now ready for prime time.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
9:17 AM

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing. It's a great term, "Cloud Computing," as it conjures up visions of an invisible Internet — an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Monday, June 2, 2008
8:51 AM

In the world of Business Intelligence, Excel is the devil and BI tools are the savoir. Spreadsheets are a satanic element we're trying to drive from unrepentant departments. This is because centralized data is good and distributed data is bad.

Ideologies exist to simplify the world by trying to separate everything into two buckets: good and evil. A spreadsheet being used for BI, like the devil, is the embodiment of badness. As with all good demons, a spreadsheet entices people to make bad choices and do bad things like retaining data in files on their PCs.

How does it entice people? By offering something of value, like simplicity or ease of use. Ever try to add a quick formula to a Web-delivered report? It can be a nightmare. Export the report into Excel and it’s a snap. A spreadsheet is malleable, unlike the rigid offerings of the BI orthodoxy.