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A Year of IntelligentEnterprise.com

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, December 31, 2007
2:15 PM

It has been a year since Intelligent Enterprise magazine went on-line only. The last print issue, dated January 2007, came out last December. I thought I would miss the paper edition but now I see that, from a writer's point of view, the overhead of a print run, particularly for an IT publication, is a greater liability than may be justified by the extra value delivered.

I was afraid that writing for Web distribution would diminish my authority as an analytics-industry observer. After all, the expense of producing and distributing printed magazines says that someone, even if only the publisher, thinks that the content justifies the cost. Sure, items on the Web are more findable and, simultaneously, timely and long-lived. But for an established author, the threat of losing the distinction conferred by paper counterbalances greater reach and timeliness. That threat hasn't been realized.

Continue reading "A Year of IntelligentEnterprise.com"

Comments

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, December 27, 2007
11:44 AM

It seems that everyone is putting up predictions for 2008, so why should I be an exception? Here is what I think will occur in the world of software as a service this New Year:

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, December 24, 2007
10:28 PM

I wrote last week about a set of New York Times campaign visualizations that caught my eye. They met my "good" criteria: data-appropriate, designed to communicate rather than (merely) show off. The good is often contrasted with the bad and the ugly. Let's check out examples and then look at a TIBCO-Spotfire demonstration site.

The Bad: A Map of the Political Blogosphere from Linkinfluence, a company that "engineers mapping, monitoring, and analytics solutions for the social web." I read about the site in Matthew Hurst's Data Mining blog. Matthew writes, "I believe that they have put plenty of effort in to the design of the data visualization and the overall look and feel to really make the site stand apart from others in this space."

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, December 21, 2007
11:46 AM

I have a home office, so when someone pulled up in a Budget rental truck, my first thought was, "Wrong house. We're not moving." Much to my surprise, it was the FedEx delivery person. How brilliant is that?

Posted by Mark Madsen
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
9:42 AM

The reasonable-sounding CRM conventional wisdom is that you should "fire your low-value customers," but it turns out to be not so reasonable after all. The theory is that low (or negative) value customers are a drain on limited resources, so getting rid of them should raise margins and make the company more profitable. Except it doesn't, according to a recent study by two Wharton marketing professors.

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
3:20 PM

"Commercial open-source software" certainly sounds like a contradiction in terms. The phrase "free and open" is part of the definition of open source software, which translated into real terms means that people can download the software and source code at will and for no charge. In most instances, this is how open-source works. Where it may work less well is for the enterprise.

Here's what Bill Hilf, Microsoft's General Manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy has to say in a recent Information Week interview: "When people buy commercial software, really what they are buying is a guarantee. You're buying a guarantee that what you have will perform, and has been tested and there's someone you can call up, and if things go really bad someone's liable if something doesn't work. You're buying this ecosystem of accountability."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
2:34 PM

I do admire a nice visualization, one whose composition suits the nature of the underlying data, one designed to communicate rather than as a means of showing off technology. Given these criteria, the New York Times delivered twice last Sunday with a pair of visualizations that nicely distill presidential-campaign themes and dynamics from what was otherwise a mighty big pile of words: debate transcripts. The Times's visualizations are useful in another way. They exemplify good design, especially when contrasted with other technology-first visualizations on similar topics.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, December 17, 2007
12:32 PM

As the year winds down I'm in a reflective frame of mind. Today I posted the list of IE's Top 20 Articles of 2007. It's an interesting indication of reader interest, but being measured in page views, the list doesn't do justice to all the single-page blogs we publish. (On the other hand, if a reader clicks to the very last page of a multi-page article, they're truly engaged!) Thus, for those who follow our blogosphere, here are the Top-20 Intelligent Enterprise Blogs of 2007:

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
6:45 AM

"As you may know, Intelligent Enterprise ceased print publication with the January 2007 issue, but rest assured that the mission lives on and is being reinvigorated here at IntelligentEnterprise.com… "

I posted these words nearly a year ago, and I'm happy to report that we've delivered on what we promised — up to a point.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
8:59 AM

As outlined in this article, SaaS seems to be gaining favor with end users, which should be no shock.

"Software-as-a-service is preferred by most end users over the kind of service support and maintenance provided by traditional customer relationship management (CRM) vendors, new research has concluded.

Datamonitor conducted a survey of 300 pharmaceutical and biotech firms across Europe and North America and stated that the on-demand CRM delivery provided by SaaS was more popular in the five areas of service analyzed."

The prediction by many in IT that end users would push back on SaaS is just not coming true. Indeed, the more that SaaS becomes a part of the enterprise application suite, the more the end users seem to like it.

I think this is the case for a few reasons:

Posted by Bruce Silver
Monday, December 10, 2007
2:52 PM

In the early days of BPM — four or five years ago — everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can't, didn't seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form. The BPEL designer would use the BPMN as business input to the implementation and go from there.

Then a new concept emerged, the BPM Suite, which included process modeling, executable implementation, and BAM in an integrated toolset that promised the improved business-IT alignment and agility needed to cope with ever-changing business requirements. Suddenly the process model became more than a business requirements spec. It was actually the first phase of the process implementation. No problem, said the BPEL vendors. We'll just generate skeleton BPEL from the process model, and use that as the starting point for the BPEL designer. Voila! Business empowerment! Business-IT alignment!

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, December 7, 2007
11:06 AM

My first Christmas present arrived the other day: a copy of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App. Author Cindi Howson sent it to me in part as thanks for Intelligent Enterprise's help in getting more than 500 BI professionals to complete a 30-question survey that provided insight into the best practices detailed in the book.

True to its name, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App is a 244-page guidebook that will help beginners get off on the right foot while guiding veterans toward more successful approaches. The book is geared, as Cindi explains, to "businesspeople who feel their organizations are not making the most optimal decisions," as well as to executive sponsors, BI program/project managers and technical experts who design and implement aspects of the BI solution.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, December 6, 2007
12:08 AM

At the Gilbane Conference keynote last week, execs from enterprise content management vendors Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe focussed on — perhaps inevitably — Enterprise 2.0. The overall gist was: enterprises should focus on sharing information rather than just controlling it.

Well of course that's true. But it's always been true.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
10:09 AM

I sat in on a presentation by Michael zur Muehlen on business processes and rules at the recent IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference. Michael is responsible for Business Process Management courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules:

• Simpler processes
• Higher agility
• Better risk management

Who wouldn't want this? However, he points out that users don't like processes, since they find them abstract (or possibly requiring a more analytic view of the organization) and restrictive (that is, not able to capture all the actual business cases). He also points out the obvious problem with Eclipse-based process modeling tools: they're not friendly to business types, so you end up with technical people maintaining business processes, which usually results in a lot of code and the next generation of legacy systems.

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
2:22 PM

In "Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations," Dorset House Publishing, 1996, Robert Austin made a very clear case that performance measurement often leads, paradoxically, to distortion and dysfunction instead of improvement. According to Austin — and I agree with him, having witnessed this phenomenon firsthand more than once — measuring an indicator of a performance (since we usually can’t indicate the actual performance itself), raises the risk of making things worse. How can that be?

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
10:01 AM

ParAccel announced top TPC-H benchmark performance numbers with Sun at the end of October, beating out the former leaders in both the price and price-performance. Not by a little, but by four times in performance with a big drop in cost. I haven't seen much discussion of these results.

The fact that a little startup like ParAccel can enter the market with a database to support business intelligence that beats the TPC-H results of all the major vendors on both performance and price should wake people up. Particularly when the performance increase is so large while significantly decreasing cost.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, December 3, 2007
11:15 PM

Facebook is good for something (beyond wasting time)! It brought me to a BI 3.0 discussion thread started by Darren Cunningham, prompted by his LucidEra colleague Ken Rudin's blog entry, What's in Store for Business Intelligence in 2008.

Ken is perceptive. His five predictions are:

1. SaaS BI will continue to gain market traction.
2. BI innovation will be led by newer vendors.
3. There will be a shift away from tools towards prebuilt analytic applications.
4. Applications that integrate data and improve processes across transactional systems will drive the next wave of SaaS.
5. A new breed of BI channel partners will emerge.

Do follow the link and read the full blog article, and then consider my BI 3.0 comment addressed to Darren, that LucidEra does interesting enough work, but Ken Rudin's hot-in-2008 list is mighty solipsistic. Is there really nothing (significant) in store for BI in 2008 that isn't touched on by LucidEra offerings?

Posted by Bruce Silver
Monday, December 3, 2007
9:21 AM

When I launched my course "Process Modeling with BPMN," I discussed why so many people beginning to "do" business process management (BPM) were looking for training in modeling, and why that was especially needed for BPMN. Now, having delivered the training, I have a better appreciation of Business Process Modeling Notation's strengths and limitations, a better understanding of what students really want, and what they really need to know about BPMN modeling. This post describes what I got right the first time and where I've had to adjust.