Intelligent Enterprise

While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of reasons (a point I detail in the CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008). Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST, see the Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog as CMSWatch.com, I highlighted a FAST presentation that showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts that demonstrate several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, including content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

Now that the dust is settling on Microsoft's failed Yahoo! bid, let's turn our attention to the announcement (burried under the hostile-takeover talk) that Yahoo! will make IndexTools a free service. Coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, it would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other Web analytics vendors about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

That might be one way to restate the premise of a survey on the Business Process Management Notation standard that has stirred up quite a controversy. The survey is interesting (because it raises some some good questions about BPMN and business process modeling) and entertaining (because it challenges dogmatic thinking on the topic).

In nutshell, the researchers reviewed 126 BPMN diagrams collected from "consultants, seminar participants, and online sources" (in other words, more or less unscientifically, which of course does not automatically invalidate the research), and found that of the 52 distinct elements (symbols) that exist in BPMN 1.1 specifications:

- Only nine elements were used on the average in each diagram (i.e. less than 20%)
- Only five elements were used in more than half the models, and another six symbols in a fourth of the models
- 17 elements (more than 30%) were used in three or fewer models, including five elements not used at all!

The New York Times publishes exceptional visualizations. A couple this week stand out: All of Inflation's Little Parts, graphing the average American's spending by category, and a map of the human "diseasome" that supports the article, Redefining Disease, Genes and All.

What distinguishes these visualizations — the first is a form of treemap, a "space-constrained visualization of hierarchies," and the second a network-connectivity diagram — is their success at communicating relationships along multiple data dimensions.

What's the Deal With Server Virtualization? Over the past few years, I've been suggesting that people stop managing from scarcity. What that means is that the cost of hardware has fallen so sharply that we should reevaluate our methodologies and designs that sacrifice function for resource efficiency. In data warehousing, we still create summarized versions of detailed data in order to avoid costly queries from eating up the big data warehouse, depriving people of the analytical content of the whole picture. In other cases, people are restricted to certain times of the day, or certain subsets of data or governors are placed on queries. With the cost of computing power dropping four or five orders of magnitude since data warehouses were invented, is this really necessary?

The topic of business intelligence was largely missing in action at this week's SAPPHIRE event, though John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, an SAP Company, did give a keynote address today (albeit at 4:30 pm — not exactly prime time). One of the highlights of the presentation was a demo of Polestar running on top of the SAP BI Accelerator. Polestar is Business Object's search-style interface for BI while BIA is SAP's in-memory analytic appliance. The demo presented more evidence that in-memory technology will get fast-track attention in the SAP/Business Objects integration.

I'm picking and choosing my sessions here at SAPPHIRE carefully, in part because I have some prearranged meetings specifically about BPM. I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, this afternoon; funnily enough, just after I attended Ginger Gatling's session this morning, I had lunch in the press area, and when I mentioned that I'd seen the session on the new SAP BPM, three pairs of ears at the table swiveled around. These three, who I didn't know (nametags, unfortunately, hang below the level of the table when seated), gave me a light grilling on my opinions of what I had seen; although I figured that they worked for SAP, it wasn't until they stood up that I saw Hilpert's name tag.

By the time that we had our prearranged meeting, then, he knew that I'd seen a product overview, and he'd already heard my views on it, so we could jump right to some of the good stuff.

Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, the update of the Business Process Management Notation standard now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way.

Oracle's Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it "keeps simple things simple" by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.0 "should maintain this flexibility." In response, IDS Scheer's Sebastian Stein points out that a problem with BPMN 1.x is that it "only has implicitly defined execution semantics," and BPMN 2.0 needs to make them explicit. He goes on to neatly summarize the competing proposals:

It's my first time at SAPPHIRE, and I have one initial impression: this conference is huge. For me, 1,500 people at a conference is big, and this one is ten times that size. The press room is the size of a regular conference's general session ballroom. I just hiked 15 minutes to get to a session. More sessions run simultaneously than you'll find in total at most conferences. There are 30 official conference hotels. Wow. And I have to report that there are five bars of free wifi coverage everywhere in the conference center.

After a review of the massive schedule, I finally made it to a session: Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM Product Manager, giving an overview of the business process management (BPM) component in SAP, including a demo and some thoughts on the future functionality. She started with a discussion of the evolution of BPM, including the drivers that have moved us from the old-style workflow and EAI to the present-day collaborative design environment where multiple people might be working on modeling different components, from human-facing processes to rules. For SAP, however, a lot of this is future-state, not what they have now in the shipping product.

It's no mystery why diamonds are often referred to as "ice." Sure, they look like ice, all clear and faceted. But have you ever touched one and noticed it was cooler than you thought it would be? You probably thought it was just the power of suggestion, but it really is cooler. The reason is that a diamond's stiff crystalline structure actually shields the atoms from heat vibrations. So what does this have to do with information technology? A lot.

Regarding TIBCO's first-ever "analyst summit" at their annual TUCON user conference, I'll leave it to Sandy Kemsley to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I'll stick to the impressionistic view.

Apparently "the analysts" told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about "value propositions." Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics? Scary. But, having lowered my expectations completely, TIBCO's "solution showcase" exhibits — open to the hoi polloi after the analyst event ended — actually blew my socks off:

Speaking at this week's "TUCON 08" TIBCO user conference in San Francisco, Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of that TIBCO division, discussed the capabilities of the technology and what's been done to integrate Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insight — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence (BI) just doesn't cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer Web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's "compliance."

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out that the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.

It's your last chance to "Take The Poll" on our home page (left column below the blog). I'm wrapping up this month's interactive poll on performance management and will post a new poll for May. So... Which of the following best describes your top performance management priority?

My assessment might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My last blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization's data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business.

While many tout BI as a way of boosting profits, BI is increasingly going green as a way to promote sustainability and good corporate citizenship.

Under full disclosure here, I am thrilled that green is gaining ground! I am green, very green. Admittedly, I was not always so passionate about these topics. However, living in Switzerland for eight years forever changed my view of garbage. Indeed the Swiss have "garbage police" who will check your trash to ensure you are recycling and fine you if you're not recycling (I wish they'd visit NJ for a week!). As trash bags are expensive in Switzerland ($10 a bag, if I recall correctly), manufacturers package their consumer products frugally. You can buy milk and fabric softener in something like a ziploc bag, which creates less trash than big plastic cartons. For companies that don't package their goods so wisely, shoppers unwrap things at the supermarket and let the store deal with the unwanted packaging.

Cheers to Microsoft Labs for their release of Search Commands, an Office 2007 add-in that "helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in... Word, Excel, and PowerPoint." The embedded Guided Help calls it "a useful complement to the usual method of browsing for commands by clicking tabs on the Ribbon."

I'm all for a way to work around Office ribbons, a set of interface elements introduced in Office 2007 that I characterized last September as "visually unbalanced." Ribbons degrade Office usability. I wrote in September that "they force extra clicking around for routine work and make it hard to find less frequently used functions." Microsoft is now, essentially, pleading guilty. Search Commands' Guided Help, in addition to calling the awkward process of "browsing for commands by clicking tabs" a "usual method," says Search Commands is "especially useful for finding commands that you use less often."