Intelligent Enterprise

I remember (lo these many years ago…) when IBM proved that the elephant could dance, and the name of the dance was PC. An obscure IBM skunk works in Boca Raton, Florida hatched this insanely great idea – a personal computer made out of cheap parts from all over the place – and two years later it became the world standard. Now I'm not saying that IBM's embrace of enterprise mashups is on the same order as the PC; but of all the really big IT companies, you'd think IBM would be among the last to adopt a technology called 'mashup.'

As I explored in this case study about a Defence Intelligence Agency mashup, the technology at its most fundamental addresses one of the oldest IT problems around: Delivering appropriate data in a usable fashion to those who make decisions. What's different now, obviously, is the Internet and the technologies behind Web applications and Web 2.0.

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. During the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital, even though paper is clearly here to stay.

Search isn't that great anymore. For one thing, it's become so commercial that it's really more like an ad search engine. SEO programs game the big ones to the point that you have to go to page 20 before you find something that isn't trying to sell what you're looking for. I want the Scotty Effect for myself (see my previous post). Why can't I ask a search engine questions and get sent to exactly the places with the answers, not 10,000 hits? Why can't the search engines help me assemble the information I need?

Tom Davenport suggests that the competitive playing field for businesses is analytics. I think we'd all be a lot better off if we could do some analytics for ourselves. What do you think? Here are some things I wonder about:

As the mists clear away on the HP-EDS deal, it appears that there’s good news in the making for companies that outsource their infrastructure, and not-so-good news for HP competitors. Judging from the technology analysts/media response, here is an early assessment of the impact of the merger…

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The recently announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

News is that HP is purchasing EDS. HP was already marginally bigger than IBM, and now with this bold move, HP is looking to catch up with IBM in the lucrative Services sector, which provides a large chunk of IBM's revenue and an even larger chunk of profitability. In data management, though, IBM will probably continue to have a formidable lead for some time.

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.

Whether you want to advance your career or just improve your team's chances of success, IT professionals would do well to read this week's installment of "Kimball University," entitled "Better Business Skills for BI and Data Warehouse Professionals". The title notwithstanding, it's a great guide for any IT pro who wants to better understand the business, improve interactions with colleagues and superiors, and develop better communication skills. I can personally vouch for several of the 12 resources author Warren Thornthwaite suggests.

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.