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Can Security Awareness Deliver Competitive Advantage?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
11:22 PM

It's disconcerting to live in a world where security can be seen as delivering competitive advantage, yet that's the idea behind Unisys's Enterprise Security initiative. But after all, the company's Trusted Enterprise Model only extends the security selling point that is a marketing mainstay for financial institutions and that has been adopted or embraced by IT vendors, sometimes far too slowly, with the rise of network computing.

Continue reading "Can Security Awareness Deliver Competitive Advantage?"

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Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
9:45 AM

At last week's Business Rules Forum, Kathy Long of the Process Renewal Group talked about how to derive rules from processes and use them as guides to the process. There are a number of process-related problems that can occur when the rules are not explicit: assumed policies, activities with experience as the only guide, and inconsistent (and therefore likely non-compliant) processes.

The key things to consider when analyzing the guides for a process can be focused around what happens at a given activity (and what knowledge is required, what decisions are required, what reports have to be generated) as well as a number of other factors. Long presents a number of questions to ask to drive out the rules and make them explicit.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
3:30 PM

There has been plenty of discussion over the last few days about consolidation in the Web analytics marketplace due to the Omniture/Visual Sciences deal. I believe the whole notion of consolidation is really more relevant if you invest in Web analytics companies, rather than use their products.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, October 29, 2007
4:31 PM

I promised to follow an earlier article that looked at database management systems as a commodity technology with a similar assessment of business intelligence. In drafting the promised article, however, I realized that I couldn't limit my evaluation to the software side of BI.

BI is complex. It is simultaneously software, transformational work practices, and business information. Admittedly, I am going far beyond IE Editor in Chief Doug Henschen's take on BI, but consider: What value is reporting or OLAP or data mining — software — that doesn't tap all data that contributes to relevant business insights — information — that can help you restructure, realign, or optimize business operations — practices? To understand if BI is a commodity technology, we need to examine all three, complementary aspects of business intelligence: software, information, and practices.

Let's start with information, with BI sources and BI results.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, October 29, 2007
1:45 AM

Following up on my last post about all the good things I encountered at Business Objects' recent user conference in Orlando, Fla., here are a few looming and, in some cases, troubling aspects of what's ahead for customers in the wake of the pending SAP acquisition.

Business Objects is very bullish on its approach to enterprise performance management (EPM), a topic highlighted in many executive keynotes at the event. Most particularly, Mark Doll, head of the EPM business unit, talked about new services tied to performance management products. Despite all the reassuring words, I have my doubts about what lies ahead.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, October 29, 2007
1:38 AM

My trip to the recent Business Objects user conference in Orlando, Fla., revealed many good surprises as well as many big questions yet to be answered. Of course I went into the conference with some skepticism about the pending acquisition by SAP, as I explained in this blog. Business Objects founder and chairman Bernard Liautaud addressed the deal during the opening of the event, and his comments quickly transitioned to those of SAP CEO Henning Kagermann (by way of video), who shared a welcome message and a commitment to the importance of the acquisition.

With many forks in the path ahead for customers and partners of Business Objects, Kagermann's video created more uncertainty than comfort. SAP's BI and Performance Management strategy has changed dramatically since the departure of Shai Agassi, who I believe, looking back, was holding SAP's strategy steady and avoiding acquisition chaos, as I pointed out in this blog.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, October 26, 2007
3:49 PM

After rejecting Oracle's initial bid for $6.7 billion, BEA has now indicated readiness to sell itself to Oracle ("or any other bidder") for about $8.2 billion. With Oracle's insatiable appetite, BEA's relative stagnation, and incessant pressure from billionaire investor Karl Icahn on BEA management, the acquisition now seems to be only a matter of time. So, what does Oracle get for $8 billion and change? A cake that it has always coveted…and an icing to die for.

Oracle has always been a leader in terms sheer market size and growth, but the same can hardly be said in terms of its technological prowess. The fact is, Oracle has always lagged behind its acquisitions — be it Siebel (CRM), PeopleSoft (HRM, Hyperion (BI) — or now BEA (application middleware). On the other hand, BEA has always led the market in terms of technology. Consider, for example, its main product lines around the application server (Webogic), integration services (AquaLogic) and transaction processing (Tuxedo).

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, October 26, 2007
10:33 AM

It has been a busy month, so I've decided to blog journal style this week, sharing snippets and scuttlebut picked up here and there…

Early this week one member of our blogophere passed along the rumor that Wal-Mart didn't actually pay for its license of NeoView, HP's new data warehouse appliance. The rumor has it that it's a gratis co-development project. There's no doubt it was a cozy deal given that HP CIO Randy Mott was 22-year Wal-Mart veteran and former CIO.

I asked for comment from HP, and here's what John
Miller, Senior Director, Business Intelligence Marketing, had to say: "Wal-Mart is a customer that has purchased HP Neoview but the terms of HP's contractual agreements are not for public disclosure."

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 25, 2007
5:09 PM

David Straus of Corticon gave an engaging presentation here at this week's Business Rules Forum about business rules and business intelligence, starting with the Wikipedia definitions of each. He characterized BI as "understanding" and BR as "action" (not unlike my statement that BI in BPM is about visibility and BR in BPM is about agility). He started with the basic drivers for a business rules management system — agility (speed and cost), business control while maintaining IT compliance, transparency, and business improvement (reduce costs, reduce risk, increase revenue) — and went on to some generalized use cases for rules-driven analysis:

• Analyze transaction compliance, i.e., are the human decisions in a business process compliant with the policies and regulations?

• Analyze the effect of automation with business rules, i.e., when a previously manual step is automated through the application of rules

• Analyze business policy rules change (automated or non-automated)

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, October 25, 2007
9:03 AM

The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis has already taken its toll in more ways than one, and it's now adding a new twist to the concept of data ownership. For all of us sitting back thinking it's someone else's problem, here's a real eye-opener.

American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation (AHM), among America's biggest mortgage lenders, recently filed for bankruptcy on account of its sub-prime lending exposure. This, in turn, alarmed large AHM clients like Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, which promptly terminated client-servicing agreements with AHM and asked it to return client files, meaning mortgage files for individual home owners serviced by AHM on their behalf, including data related to mortgage principal, interest, property taxes and insurance (PITI).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
6:28 AM

After a brief intro by Gladys Lam, the executive director of the Business Rules Forum, the conference kicked off with a keynote from Ron Ross, the driving force behind this event and a big name in the business rules community. A couple of things are distracting my attention from his talk: I'm up directly after him, and I'm presenting in this room, which is the main (read: big) conference hall. Let me make my ever-present complaint about passworded wifi in the meeting room and no free wifi or wired internet in the hotel, since I know that my regular readers would be disappointed without that news from the front lines.

Ron and I have exchanged email over the years, but this is our first opportunity to meet face-to-face; I'll also have the chance to meet James Taylor and a few others who I only know from afar. Today, Ron's talking about the shift from business rules to enterprise decisioning. This is the first business rules conference that I've ever attended, which means that most of the attendees likely know a lot more about the subject matter than I do, and most of the sessions will be new material for me.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
10:35 AM

At every talk or seminar I give on enterprise content management (ECM) technology, I stress to attendees that they have many different options -- including software as a service (SaaS). It's still early days for SaaS ECM, but the approach is now joining open source as a viable alternative to traditional software licensing models. So I have no problem telling buyers that SaaS may be worth considering, but actually recommending that they pursue a SaaS option is still something of a stretch for me.

There are some very strong selling points for SaaS, including the relative ease of deployment and potentially much lower operating costs, not to mention the obvious appeal of obviating IT burdens such as patch management. Although ECM SaaS providers remain few in number, the scope of their offerings is widening. For example Xythos sells a dedicated SaaS option that seems to be building out a decent customer base for its basic-but-proven document collaboration services. SaaS ECM market leader Spring CM has a quite full offering — the equivalent of many traditional ECM vendors — with a wide range of productized applications, ranging from mortgage processing to hospital bill reconciliation.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Monday, October 22, 2007
6:17 PM

Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima describes in a Monday, October 22 article, "From Casinos to Counterterrorism," how Las Vegas is a cutting-edge adopter of surveillance technology that has also found its way into U.S. security efforts. Las Vegas has "embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country."

The casinos are applying facial-recognition, information-sharing, link-analysis, and sophisticated pattern-detection technologies to spot card counters, cheaters, and illegal collusion. Exhaustive tracking helps identify suspicious behavior and spot both high-rollers, who receive special treatment, and low- and middle-rollers, who are targeted for promotions. The casinos are even starting to use gaming chips with embedded RFID chips to track betting.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, October 22, 2007
2:52 PM

Just back from both SAP's Reporting and Analytics conference and Business Objects' Insight conference, both of which were coincidentally in Orlando, Fla., this year.

SAP only recently (as in the last six months, not only last two weeks) was added to my radar. It seemed to me that the Netweaver BI 7.0 release (June 2006) was a marked improvement over the earlier versions. As well, the number of customers telling me they had made the strategic decision to use SAP's BI platform has been on an upswing. So in planning travel schedules, it was unfortunate that both vendors had their conferences the same week but fortuitous they were in the same town.

An interesting difference between the two events: SAP's comments on the pending acquisition? Zero. Comments at the Business Objects event? A lot (see below).

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, October 22, 2007
9:34 AM

I ran across this article in Computer World entitled "Nine things you need to know about SaaS." Pretty normal SaaS 101 stuff, but I was interested in number seven, "How mature is the SaaS market." The answer offered, as quoted below, came from SaaS expert Mike West, Vice President at Saugatuck Technology, a boutique management consulting and subscription research company focused on disruptive technologies.

The market is in its early high-growth phase, having passed the inflection point in the typical high-tech market scenario, West says. It's characterized by large numbers of fairly small vendors, with more entering constantly. In this case, the growth in the number of providers is being aided by some very large organizations, including Microsoft Corp. and IBM, and some small middleware vendors such as Progress Software Corp., which are helping business partners, particularly independent software vendors, move into the market.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, October 19, 2007
5:36 PM

A few months ago, I blogged about the unexpectedly good experience I had at the Canadian passport office, where the process actually worked the way it was supposed to, and rewarded the consumer (me) by accelerating my wait time since I did my own data entry online. I recently had two other government business process experiences: one good, one bad.

The good experience was with NEXUS, a joint program between the Canadian and American governments to allow frequent travelers to replace the long immigration line-ups in both directions with a retinal scan for authentication and a few questions on a touch-screen kiosk. Since I travel across the border fairly regularly, I decided to apply for this, especially after being stuck in a line of 500 people waiting for immigration checks a few times. Friends warned that it took six to seven weeks for the preliminary approval, and that the follow-up interviews were already being scheduled for December. Wrong.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, October 19, 2007
9:06 AM

A quick notice to let everyone know that the nomination period for the 2008 Jolt Awards is now open.

I'm a Jolt Awards judge, my second year, while this is the 18th go-around for the awards. The main sponsor is Dr. Dobb's, like Intelligent Enterprise a CMP computing magazine (or is IE a business magazine focusing on computing or is IE a portal rather than a magazine?)

The Jolt Awards target various aspects of software development practice: development environments, management and coding tools and utilities, libraries, books, developer networks, and lots more.

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, October 18, 2007
9:02 AM

I take the topic of this blog literally: Will the enterprise enter the "mashup" maze? IBM thinks so. IBM would not call it a maze. They call it the IBM Mashup Starter Kit and recently put it up for (free) download. It's part of their angle on Web 2.0 applications, in fact one of the leading parts (along with webtwoifying Lotus Notes). What IBM is doing with mashups is interesting for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most significant is that IBM is pushing mashups at all.

It's not that mashups (however defined) aren't being taken seriously in the enterprise – for the most part they're not. It's that IBM, the primus inter pares of enterprise vendors, has chosen mashups as a key product for development.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
5:37 PM

Prof. Jorge Cardoso of the University of Madeira, Portugal, has written a very interesting paper titled "The Semantic Web Vision: Where are We?" Cardoso surveyed over 600 academic and industry researchers in December 2006. He published his findings in the September-October 2007 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems. They include that "mainstream adoption is still five to ten years away."

Cardoso defines the Semantic Web as "a machine-readable World Wide Web" and he notes "a significant evolution of standards as improvements and innovations allow the delivery of more complex, more sophisticated, and more far-reaching semantic applications." (Bill Inmon, please note.)

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
12:25 PM

In this post, Krissi Danielsson asks whether virtual software appliances compete with SaaS.

"The virtual appliance idea targets many of the same customers as SaaS, and the article points out that some companies may prefer the virtual appliance route since it would keep data in-house. Big vendors are starting to sell software to run in a VMware environment and VMware is boasting more than 2,500 virtual appliance downloads per day. But will these appliances rival SaaS? Time will tell."

So, what the heck is a virtual appliance anyway? For that answer, I found the best description on Wikipedia:

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
3:37 PM

In the second annual IBM Information On Demand Conference this week, a series of new advancements were brought forward in information management. Now with an even more solid and robust portfolio of products, there is great momentum in the company's focus on Information Management. IBM has been on a multi-year transformation of its content, data and information focus with process and integration technologies through acquisitions of a large number of technology suppliers over the last three years. These technologies have been slowly but progressively advancing the IBM software product portfolio for a broader range of information management capabilities.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
9:09 AM

Last week I attended the Teradata partners conference, one of the best events to go to if you want to see some of the leading-edge things people are doing. Unlike many conferences, this one has a lot of case studies, and they set a high bar for quality. Since Teradata sits at the core of the warehouse, they get a broader range of speakers, so I always find something of interest.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, October 15, 2007
12:07 AM

Is there anything to add to an item that was the rage of the political media a month back, the misuse of one of our favorite miscommunication tools, PowerPoint, by U.S. military leadership? Check out Gen. David Petraeus' September 10, 2007 slideshow explaining and justifying the drawdown of U.S. troops inserted into Iraq in the recent "surge." The bloggers (e.g., Yglesias, Benen, Drum) found particularly notable an egregiously amateurish slide that related simply that in nine months, troop levels would be back to the levels of nine months previous.

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, October 12, 2007
9:38 AM

Okay, so no one has used the term "MIS" (Management Information Systems) in years, but there was no way to work "IT" into the title with misinformation. I always used to laugh, by the way, when before the current CHIEF craze (CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, CTO, etc.), the head of IT was often called the MIS Manager. The qualification for the job was, appropriately, being skilled in MIS management.

CIO Insight's October, 2007 report "How Valuable Is Business Intelligence to the Enterprise?" is another example of so-called research that makes no sense. The most curious aspect of this survey was that the respondents were all IT people. For my money, if you want to know how BI is doing, you should ask the people who use it (or don't use it).

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, October 11, 2007
2:30 PM

One of the great divides in the ECM world is the gulf between (and different understanding of) the needs of records management, on the one hand, versus IT storage on the other.

Archiving, storage and retention all sound like similar disciplines, and to hear some IT folk speak, you could be excused for thinking they are one and the same thing. All too often very expensive electronic storage hardware and software systems operate in ignorance of, and non-compliance with, legal and regulatory demands.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
9:17 AM

Amid all the mega deals and consolidation in the greater business intelligence market this year, I'm seeing a lot of bending of terminology and twisting of meanings. It's getting downright confusing for existing BI practitioners, let alone the first-time buyers out there.

I used "greater business intelligence market" above because to some, BI means just query and reporting while others would lump in analytics, dashboards and even scorecards and performance management (the last term could spark a terminology debate on its own, but let's not go there just yet). To me, the greater BI market includes all of the above.

To get some idea what the originator of "business intelligence" had in mind when he coined the term way back in 1989, I called up Howard Dresner to talk about terminology.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
10:45 AM

I guess SAP's acquisitions of OutlookSoft and Pilot Software were not enough as they announced their intention to acquire Business Objects to bulk up in the BI and Performance Management markets. What does it mean to you who might be a customer of Business Objects or SAP?

If you are in the middle of evaluating SAP or Business Objects products in analytics, BI or performance management, take heed and prepare for a rocky future. Organizations evaluating SAP should stop and perform a thorough review before proceeding on new or existing projects. SAP products like SAP SEM, SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP BW and even recently acquired OutlookSoft are part of the overlap with Business Objects. Those evaluating Business Objects products should consider the potential impact on existing and planned deployments. While SAP plans to keep Business Objects as a separate organization, the reality is that there will be significant changes to existing products to ensure that they integrate effectively with SAP.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, October 8, 2007
10:57 AM

It looks like this time the rumor mill got it right as SAP announced its friendly take over of Business Objects, to the tune of 4.8 billion Euros or $6.8 billion. It makes it the priciest BI/Performance Management deals of the year.

Business Objects CEO John Schwarz did say that the rumors were wrong about the company being shopped around and instead SAP had approached Business Objects. The agreement to be acquired does indicate a change of course for Business Objects, which previously stated its intent to remain a pure-play vendor. With the deal valued at more than five times revenue, the price must have been right. Add to that an SAP-Business Objects combination makes a formidable competitor versus Oracle-Hyperion and Microsoft.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Monday, October 8, 2007
1:47 AM

SAP and Business Objects are calling the acquisition of the latter a friendly takeover, although I wonder how many employees will view it that way. With this purchase, the BI market now looks a lot like the ETL market. There's only one large independent vendor in each market - Informatica for ETL and Cognos for BI - and a bunch of mostly smaller companies left.

This is a great thing for SAP since they can now start taking in sales for BI where once it all went to third parties. They also get a decent set of data integration and data quality products to complement SAP's sore applications. It's good for Business Objects too, since this opens up the market for all those SAP accounts.

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, October 5, 2007
7:27 AM

I spoke at Salesforce.com's recent DreamForce event on the topic of SOA on demand. I've held back on writing about the event because I wanted to check out other blogs covering the event and attempt to aggregate the analysis here.

First of all, the SaaS space is pretty easy to define. It's Salesforce.com and, with the possible exception of NetSuite and RightNow, a bunch of other little guys. The event was huge, with more than 7,000 users, partners, press and analysts, up from fewer than 5,000 a year ago. Get the trend here?

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, October 4, 2007
9:35 AM

Every time there’s a new technology, trend or technique in the computer industry, thousands of minds engage with the important questions of IF or WHEN to get into it and the well-known "technology cycle of adoption." I usually characterize the cycle like this: First adopters, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards, Luddites. The dynamics are fairly well understood; those who start early may have a competitive advantage but also run a higher risk of failure. Later adopters get more stable technology and better perspective, but may have little or no competitive advantage. Each organization gets to pick its strategy on a continuum from gung-ho to do-nothing.

This is the situation with Rich Internet Applications and the new software development ideas that go with it; and beyond that are the many facets of the so-called Web 2.0. I hear theme and variation on the IF and WHEN questions from IT people all the time. Even those shops that are already doing RIA development continue to re-visit the questions.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
8:58 AM

Web 2.0 technologies are going to change BI, possibly undercutting demand for conventional BI software. People wonder why I keep saying this. Here's a great example: real estate search.

Not that long ago, you would look at listings in your price range and try to work out where they were and whether they were in nice neighborhoods. More likely, a real estate agent would do this for you. Their value was almost entirely access to information and knowing how to get at it via the multi-list service.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
10:34 AM

Inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) is believed by vendors to have a very positive impact on sales. In the 2007 MQ for Enterprise Content Management, published late last month, it's clear that little (in Gartner's view) has changed in the ECM world. Well, we beg to differ: 2007 has been a period of major change! And so rather than harping on perceived weaknesses in this highly influential document, let's point out where the analysis in the CMS Watch ECM Suites Report differs from Gartner's.