Intelligent Enterprise

I hope you will excuse a departure from my BI-focused blogs to a more personal one, but on this Thanksgiving eve, I find myself thinking more about freedom and how fragile it is right now. If you are one of the many foreign-born BI product managers, software developers, or BI specialists I have met over the years, then you will want to read this story.

For more than thirty years, Information Builders, led by its founder and CEO, Gerry Cohen, has been focused on solving the tough challenges in accessibility and integration of data for business. Over the last decade I have personally witnessed the company's evolution to provide robust tools for IT and business. Last month Information Builders released its latest product, called WebFocus InfoAssist, which brings a range of BI capabilities for business and IT for easily accessing, analyzing and publishing data across the enterprise.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?

I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.

TDWI hosted its first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

Back to BI, I taught a new course at the event, the theme of which is highlighted in this week's Intelligent Enterprise In-Depth feature article, "Cool BI: Rating the Innovations." Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool '70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).

In case you haven't heard it yet, here comes a new product category: Process Intelligence. But what does it mean? All of these terms overlap: Operational BI, Pervasive BI, Operational Intelligence, Process Intelligence, BAM, CEP (Complex Event Processing), Decision Management, Decision Services. Arguments over definitions tend to be vigorous for two reasons. First, the taxonomy of product classes tends to be pretty leaky and second, the stakes are so low.

The reason it is important to get some clarity on the definitions is that the wider BI industry (and I don't know what to call it) is driven by marketing, not by function or requirements. Software vendors invent things, acquire or get acquired by other vendors and give names to the combined capabilities they possess. Then it's packaged and sold to companies.

Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

The "No Software" company, salesforce.com opened its annual Dreamforce conference yesterday with the usual loud sounds and video to introduce CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff. With more than 9,000 attendees from 40 countries in the standing-room-only keynote, Benioff said the company is doubling down on making its customers successful. The company's strategy is to put business information into their cloud computing environment and manage all your customer information, share all of your business information, and build multi-tenant applications.

On a personal note, I was pleased to hear salesforce.com highlight that it does significant work to help the community and non-profit organizations by donating more than 90,000 workforce hours and $13 million in grants to community service with some 5,000 non-profit organizations. This donation should be applauded as companies should give back to the community, especially as they continue to grow and succeed.

Saleforce.com is moving beyond the 2007 launch of the cloud computing technology platform Force.com and just competing against other IT technology platforms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, as referenced in my blog "Can salesforce.com make the dream reality." Salesforce has gone beyond the traditional enterprise software market and is venturing into a new realm of applications and platforms for developers to bring cloud computing closer to a reality in your enterprise.

Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they're not; James' premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that's appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there's a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term "orthogonal" when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you're likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.

It's obvious to everyone that we are in turbulent times as economic challenges rattle the globe. As I have been reading in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, it's clear that the finger pointing and rescue packages for large businesses will continue for some time. The question is whether the post-mortem analysis and diagnosis of the causes and symptoms will focus on the right area and help minimize future failures. Will the determination be that management processes failed and information was not put in place to provide the right level of notice to prevent the recent financial services industry meltdown?

Let's be honest. Organizations have not managed their businesses using systems to understand current performance and risk in a common, enterprisewide fashion. Without such an approach, the appropriate changes to business plans to minimize impacts on shareholders and the workforce can't be implemented. Frankly, the current environment shines the light on the lack of performance management and business intelligence. My take is that the lack of management processes, with analytics and information coordinated from across the business, has led to our current quandary. Business management in the financial services industry has failed the world by not heeding the need for enterprisewide decision-support systems for managing performance and risk.

The good news is that it's a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I'm in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I'm here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross, executive editor of BRCommunity.com, kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It's pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference outside of Washington, D.C., I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:

I will be chairing an all-new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org’s upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, agility and time to value, end user experience, and optimizing business performance. We did this in San Francisco and it worked very well. The discussion was lively and open, and I learned things about each product that I didn’t know before.

I'm at the Teradata Partners conference this week. I consider it to be the best event in the BI market if you want to see a diversity of company presentations, particularly on more advanced topics. You won't find the same number and quality of end-user presentations at any other event. The official kickoff went through some interesting and entertaining moments and closed with a terrific keynote from Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Here's my quick takes on each of the talks:

As bailouts become a global phenomenon, it's time to review what this all means for you, the technology buyer.

I think there are two main issues here:

1. The immediate liquidity crisis and any lingering effects that may lead to longer-term financial sclerosis
2. An enduring recession — which previously left much of the enterprise and web software space unscathed — getting deepened and extended

At its second annual BI conference, Microsoft offered a glimpse into what the future holds for its products. Stephen Elop, a Microsoft senior executive relatively new to business intelligence who is president of the Microsoft Business Division, introduced the theme of the conference, "Think Bigger about BI." Judging from the presentation and conversations I had, Microsoft believes it is leading the democratization of business intelligence around the world through its release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and future development projects that were officially unveiled. But is Microsoft thinking bigger or just catching up?

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, previously known as project Katmai, offers a number of new capabilities to support data warehousing and analytics for BI that expand its value as an enterprise data platform and its support of nonrelational data sources, as well as what Microsoft calls "pervasive insight" but is really the reporting and analysis of data that can be published. Microsoft has added new data adapters for Oracle, SAP BW and Teradata systems to enable users to gain better access to data and mechanisms for data compression and governors for resources and queries. A new Report Builder helps simplify developing, deploying and maintaining reports and delivering data into Microsoft Word and Excel.

While many of my peers headed to Seattle for Microsoft's BI conference this week, I headed in the opposite direction to Prague, Czech Republic, to speak at IDC's annual BI road show.

I had never been here before, and I confess I had a degree of trepidation. While Prague today is a top business and tourist destination, the fall of communism was only 20 years ago. In fact, I was living nearby in Switzerland during that profound time so the memory is not too distant as my Czech friends then wondered if it was really safe to return. Some people I spoke with lament the modernization of the country, whereas others said the changes have been too slow, particularly outside of Prague. But back to BI.

A question I posed to a LinkedIn group — Is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) a BI Application? — sparked interesting discussion. I noted and asked, "BAM involves dashboards and analyses for business processes, and BI isn't typically very processy. If not BI, who 'owns' BAM?" There have been 9 responses to date, including two from Howard Dresner, who has done as much as anyone to shape current-day BI. The responses speak to growing interest in operational BI, and they hint at the impact that complex event processing (CEP) will have on enterprise analytics.

BAM displays operational performance indicators in numerical and graphical form, often backed by rules-based alerting capabilities. BAM monitors execution of business processes and is part of operational-performance management solutions. It can be incorporated in line-of-business and operational interfaces, for instance for contact-center management, and in automated control systems. As the speed-of-business accelerates, BAM is more important than ever.

"If your Web site sucks, it's your own fault." That's the tough love Avinash Kaushik shared today here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference in New York in a presentation entiled "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Kaushik offered a bunch of great advice on how to better measure site performance and he also listed a handful of free tools. "So there can be no more excuses" like not having enough data, not having the right data or not having enough money for Web analytics, he concluded.

Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.

When it comes to analytics, Wall Street is clearly the leader. The best of the best head there after school to grab six-figure starting salaries. Some even see seven figures, based on their performance. They are the rara avises, the crθme-de-la-crθme, and whenever we speak about "Competing on Analytics," it goes without saying that Wall Street analytics represent the exemplar of what is possible for an analytic culture.

So why is Wall Street melting down?

Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

• Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
• Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
• Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
• Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

"Better, easier, lower-cost" and "more flexible." These were the adjectives respondents to a recent InformationWeek / IntelligentEnterprise survey used most often when asked "what's at the top of your business intelligence wish list?" The survey was conducted this summer and is behind this week's in-depth feature "Special Report: BI Gets Smart," as well as a full report with the complete survey results. The words "better, lower-cost," and "more flexible" applied to a range of wishes, but here are the top "must haves":

I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software.

The workshop was chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.

Back from sunny San Diego, place of TDWI's annual world conference.

I kicked off my week with a birds-of-a-feather networking event. The most popular table? The business-IT partnership, which also happens to be one of the top barriers/enablers to BI success (according to research from my book). The different perspectives — and just how polar opposites they could be — bordered on amusing.

Business Objects an SAP company brought forward the integrated strategy for where they plan to advance their organization and products into the future at last week's 2008 Influencer Summit. The core emphasis was on the product strategy and the success of the portfolio of products across enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and business intelligence (BI) and information management. This is a blend of products from Business Objects and SAP, along with companies they have acquired over the last couple of years. Business Objects has focused on how they can advance their products to address the broad set of user demographics and interactive requirements of them across organizations using Web 2.0 Internet technology.

Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) are all the rage, but it's clear that experts still disagree on a fundamental precept on the matter: Who should own the BICC?

Last week I had the opportunity to listen in on a Forrester Research Business Intelligence webinar (moderated by Doug Henschen) on the topic of BI competency centers. The question as to who should own the BICC came up at the end of the presentation. One expert's response was: assuredly, the business should own the BICC — business intelligence is all about business, and business ownership brings along business commitment. Another expert disagreed: given the various technical complexities related to business intelligence and data integration, BICC, she thought, is probably better managed by IT.

At the conclusion of Business Object's Influencer Summit yesterday, Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. Rather than attributing quotes to each executive, I've consolidated the responses on five topics:

"It's a case where one plus one equals three." Speaking at the first-ever Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston this week, this is how Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications, explained an increase in BI revenues at the company since it became a unit of SAP.

Normally, following an acquisition, sales decline for the first year or so. Not so with SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, with Poonen claiming sales were 30% higher in the first half of the year compared to 2007. He explained that there is a difference in market dynamics when a market leader acquires another leader versus a niche player. Surprising as well is that company officials estimate half the sales came from new accounts, so the strong performance is not only from Business Objects tapping existing SAP customers.

I attended the Actuate user conference last week where they brought forward a series of new advancements utilizing open source and new platform capabilities. Actuate's upgraded performance management applications and advancements in mobility further extend their use. Actuate is well known to larger corporations for vast deployments of reporting and information to the enterprise and across the Internet to customers and suppliers. Actuate has been recently shifting away from direct engagement in traditional BI market of query, reporting and analysis to data warehouses and instead extending their support of developers through open source and Internet/Intranet type applications. Actuate is extending support for Rich Internet Applications as the need for information across business and to consumers requires very scalable platforms that integrate across the enterprise.

Actuate also entered into the open source market in 2005 with BIRT (BI and Reporting Tools) contribution to Eclipse and their open source BIRT community. Actuate has bet that the use of open source will be a key component for their future and starting point for developers, where at some point will purchase support, services and then the more robust commercial products. In fact, Actuate open source efforts now contribute 10% of Actuate revenue. This open-source-based approach to commercial enterprise software expands Actuate's reach across the world and deepens relationships with developers. The benefit for developers is that it is easier to download and work with their basic products before determining what is needed for deployments that require support, services or higher-end technology.

When it comes to IT research, Gartner's "Magic Quadrants" and Forrester's "Wave" rankings carry a lot of weight with would-be technology buyers, but these reports lean more toward assessing vendors rather than products. Granted, when you're spending six or seven figures with a vendor, things like "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute" certainly matter a great deal, but most would-be buyers are equally hungry for hands-on analysis of the software they might end up using every day. In the business intelligence market, that gap is filled by Cindi Howson's BIScorecard. Here's a peek at the top-level scores, plus a link to five helpful recommendations.

Instead of just making a broad set of statements on the recent Oracle announcements made on July 16th, this is a little more depth and perspective that might be useful for you as you think about Oracle and their BI and performance management approach to the market. Oracle updates on the market in their EPM and BI product areas were delivered by their key executives Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, Thomas Kurian SVP Server Technologies and John Kopcke, SVP and GBU of EPM and BI. Oracle rolled out their last product strategy over a year ago after their acquisition of Hyperion and portfolio of BI and performance management technologies. The last major update to customers from Oracle was at Oracle OpenWorld in fall of 2007, where there seemed to be more confusion than actual answers, as pointed out in this previous blog - Oh Oracle Let's Be Honest Now.

With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there's not enough "there" there in the business rules management system market, what with only a handful of players, but yesterday's announcement by IBM that it will acquire ILog will certainly spark aftershocks. I came across a few particularly keen questions from a former industry insider.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-Franηois Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."

IBM today announced that it plans to acquire ILog, an unquestionable leader in the business rules engine marketplace. The acquisition comes at a time when ILog seemed to be faltering, with declining profitability and reliance on a troubled financial sector, but there's no doubting the tremendous value to IBM and customers.

IBM is not new to business rules engines (BRE). WebSphere has a rules component, and IBM has experience with various other rules integration models (e.g. PegaSystems, Haley etc.) as well as with in-house experimentation. Yet, IBM has always lagged in its BRE capabilities. In contrast, ILog is a known market leader with formidable capabilities and established market presence – Forrester ranks ILOG and Fair Isaac as the top two BRE vendors. Pegasystems and Corticon are the next largest competitors, while Haley was recently acquired by Australian company RuleBurst.

By acquiring DatAllegro, Microsoft is filling a performance and scalability gap that has kept them from consideration in larger data warehouse deals. Microsoft announced the acquisition today but has not yet disclosed the terms of the deal. DatAllegro just completed a series D funding round of $19.6 million in May, bringing the total funding over their five years of existence to roughly $63 million.

DatAllegro has been secretive over the past few years about its customer base, leading some analysts (including me) to wonder how well they're doing in the highly competitive data warehouse platform and appliance market. They have only three customers that I know of, but they say that the largest of these sites are storing hundreds of terabytes. This offers a compelling scalability story for Microsoft once the DatAllegro technology is merged into SQLserver.

I attended MicroStrategy's Business Intelligence Symposium this week in New York and I sat in on a preview of what promises to be a blockbuster release this fall. The list of upgrades is long, and the headliner in MicroStrategy 9 will certainly be 64-bit in-memory analysis capabilities. MicroStrategy isn't pioneering here, and plan to add it has been public knowledge for months. Nonetheless, successful delivery will put pressure on the few vendors that have yet to deliver this technology.

MicroStrategy's tech preview was delivered by Mark LaRow, vice president of products, who began by laying out the long-term goal of supporting expected super-scale deployments of the future involving as much as 10 petabytes of accessible data, 100,000 users and 1 million reports per week. That's all brainstorming work that's still in the labs, but LaRow then offered a lot more concrete detail on what to expect in the MicroStrategy 9 release in Q4. The list includes:

One week later it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling down, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20 percent of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

I covered most of the bases on Oracle's release of its Fusion Edition Enterprise Performance Management (Oracle EPM) release last week, but here's a bit more detail, as well as some interesting insight, on the integration of Hyperion Essbase with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). For instance, Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel says vendors are often guilty of referring to their products as "integrated" as if that's a binary variable.

The nitty gritty detail — the stuff that legacy customers are most interested in — was delivered last week by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies, who explained that that there are two styles of integration. "Essbase can be a source to OBIEE, so you can combine relational, OLAP and ROLAP analysis," he said. "One the financial side, you can source OBIEE relational data into Essbase, so the Oracle BI Server can become a source under Essbase."

Gary Cokins of SAS and James Taylor, my partner at Smart (enough) Systems, in an admirable attempt to disambiguate the terms Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) and Performance Management have, unfortunately, both gotten it wrong.

Gary claims that James "marginalizes Performance Management as being too narrow." Instead, he (Gary) suggests that "Performance Management and EDM are arguably very similar." James claims that EDM "goes one step further."

Oracle made big news today introducing the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Fusion Edition (Oracle EPM). The release marks both the final integration of Hyperion and Oracle technologies following last year's acquisition as well as a bold statement as to the future direction of enterprise performance management as a kind of ERP system for corporate management.

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."

When SAP acquired Business Objects early this year, it committed to keeping Business Objects as a separate company. As a separate company owned by SAP, it could better execute on its leadership in the BI market and remain open and agnostic to non-SAP customers and systems. Both also wanted to tap into any potential joint customers and synergies. One of those synergies is support.

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software — and they will — it's the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

Here's a company that gets how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don't require registration.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.

Are you as sick as I am of so-called "architects" swiftboating BPM with phony strawman arguments? Here's the latest, from blogger Nick Malik:

I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them... [BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "viola" the process becomes automated. According to the 'true believers,' we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.

Everyone loves a horse race, so it's no surprise that industry insiders and practitioners alike want to know which BI vendors are on top, which ones are growing and which ones are losing ground. That's what made this story on IDC's 2006 BI sales stats one of the most popular articles on this site last year, and it's why this week's top story recaps IDC's BI sales stats for 2007. The biggest surprise is that software sales seemed to hold up well, despite the bad economic news that started with last year's subprime meltdown.

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.

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.

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...

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.

The movie Ghostbusters is perhaps the single best training film for consultants I've come across. In simple words, they embody all the right stuff for a successful consultant which is, lets face it, a real craft, not just something to do between jobs. With motivational thoughts about teamwork, confidence, authenticity, client management and the projection of competence, these guys have it knocked. For instance:

Teamwork: There aren't many engagements where the success of the operation is dependent on just one player. It's important to organize for success and enhance everyone's contribution in a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" mentality. That special esprit de corps that develops among small groups provides the energy to keep a difficult assignment on track. And, sometimes, teamwork requires splitting the team up.

• "We have the tools, we have the talent"
• "I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!"
• "Let's split up, we can cause more damage that way"

Close to 4,000 customers and partners convened in Las Vegas last week for the annual Cognos Forum, making it Cognos' largest conference ever.

While some time was given to synergies with IBM's product line, more air time was devoted to what's new in Cognos 8.3, the performance management products, and previews of what's coming. (Oh, and remember my disbelief in an earlier blog of both Cognos and Business Objects being shrink wrapped with DB2? Well, apparently the disbelief was warranted as the Business Objects OEM never materialized.)

In terms of cool factor, a future interactive viewer capability was the flashiest — literally, as it leverages Adobe Flash to provide this appealing interface. Cognos is not the first BI vendor to leverage Flash, and lack of interactivity has been a competitive weakness.

Do you remember the movie "Star Trek IV," when the crew needs to go back to the 20th century to find two hump back whales? When that movie was released, twenty-five years ago, we were already building pricing models with DSS software, we already had SAS to build models and do statistical work and we could write reports in FOCUS or any number of other tools. Compared to the things we can do today, this may seem primitive, but how different is it really?

Consider that the density of hard drives in the same period has increased five orders of magnitude, CPU speed even more so and the cost per unit of storage or MIP has fallen off the table. With that kind of improvement, a new BMW today would go from 0 to 60 mph in 0.00008 seconds, have a top speed of 15 million miles per hour and would burn gas at a rate of 2 million miles per gallon. Oh, and it would cost about 30 cents to buy. I haven't figured out the lease yet.