Forrester's recent report on Top 15 Technologies To Watch In 2011 once again proved that BI is front and center on everyone's agendas. We indeed continue to see unrelenting interest and ever-increasing adoption levels of BI platforms, applications, and processes. But while BI maturity in enterprises continues to grow, and BI tools become more function rich and robust, the promise of efficient and effective BI solutions remains quite challenging at best, and elusive at worst. Why? Two main reasons. BI is all about best practices and lessons learned, which only come with years of experience. Additionally, traditional BI technologies (ETL, data warehousing, reporting, OLAP) have not kept pace with the ever-changing business and regulatory requirements. In a work-in-progress research document, building on a last year's relevant blog post on next-gen BI, we plan to review top best practices and next- generation BI technologies for our clients to watch and adopt in 2011 to improve their chances to deliver successful BI initiatives. Here's the proposed document outline and major themes:

BEST PRACTICES TO ADOPT IN 2011

• Emphasis on business ownership and data governance 
• Combining top-down performance management, with bottom-up approaches 
• Emphasis on change management

I am talking to you, business process change agents and architects, who drive business transformations and continuous improvement initiatives. Sometimes our conversation starts from methodologies and technologies like Lean, Six Sigma, ERP, CRM, or BPM, but it almost always ends up with questions about organizational design, governance, change planning, and execution.

I believe that each process change initiative should start with a readiness assessment of the target organization. With that in mind, Forrester has developed an online self-assessment and survey tool that can help you get a feeling about where your organization stays with respect to four must-have process change capabilities: 1) strategy; 2) process execution; 3) structure; and 4) culture of performance. For Forrester, the primary objective of this survey is to get a better understanding of how companies drive business process change initiatives to success. Please take 10 minutes to get your maturity score.

Your responses will be kept strictly confidential and will only be examined in aggregate with the others who complete this survey. If you provide valid answers to all questions, you will receive the results summary. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.

If you have insights, comments, or questions relating to the survey, please add them in the comments to get additional perspective from the community.

Thank you very much for your participation!

I was in London last week, delivering the opening keynote at the Green IT Expo conference. I had previously spoken at this event back in 2008, and it was nice to see a bigger crowd of perhaps 400-500 delegates, a lively hall full of vendor exhibitors, and a larger and plusher venue (the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in the shadow of Big Ben). In my estimation, the U.K. continues to be the country at the leading edge of innovation and implementation of IT for Sustainability. Why there? At least three factors:

1. Public awareness of climate change. Unlike here at home, there is little debate in the U.K. about the reality of climate change and the need for urgent action to monitor and reduce carbon emissions to slow its effects.

2. Government mandates for carbon reporting and reduction (the Carbon Reduction Commitment or CRC). The public awareness is reflected in governmental policy. Despite the reporting and reduction requirements of the CRC being pushed out in time, the U.K. still has the most teeth of any country or region in its mandate for companies to monitor, report, and reduce (or pay taxes on) their carbon emissions.

3. Leading companies' efforts to improve their sustainability posture. Whether it's Astra-Zeneca in pharma, Tesco and Marks & Spencer in retailing, BA in transportation, or the U.K. Ministry of Defence in the public sector, leading U.K. institutions are making the commitments and investments to transform their business processes in a more sustainable direction.

Oracle recently announced the availability of Solaris 11 Express, the first iteration of its Solaris 11 product cycle. The feature set of this release is along the lines promised by Oracle at their August analyst event this year, including:

• Scalability enhancements to set it up for future systems with higher core counts and requirements to schedule large numbers of threads.
• Improvements to zFS, Oracle’s highly scalable file system.
• Reduction of boot times to the range of 10 seconds — a truly impressive accomplishment.
• Optimizations to support Oracle Exadata and Exalogic integrated solutions. While some of these changes may be very specific to Oracle’s stack, most of them are almost certain to improve any application that requires some combination of high thread counts, large memory and low-latency communications with either 10G Ethernet or Infiniband.
• Improvements in availability due to reductions on the number of reboot scenarios, improvements in patching and improved error recovery. This is hard to measure, but Oracle claims they are close to an OS which does not need to come down for normal maintenance, a goal of all of the major UNIX vendors and long a signature of mainframe environments.