News Analysis: SAP and SUGEN Make Progress on Enterprise Support

By R "Ray" Wang

Since SAP's announcement of its single tier Enterprise Support plan last July, customers have continued to express dissatisfaction.   In response to such complaints, the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) of 12 SAP user groups and SAP have been engaging in discussions around the value derived from this new offering.  This morning SAP and SUGEN announced an agreement on three key areas of the Enterprise Support offering:

• Defined list of key performance indicators to measure the results of SAP Enterprise Support (ES) services. As part of the agreement, the value of ES will be measured by through the jointly agreed SUGEN Key Performance Indicator Index (SUGEN KPI Index).
  Based on the press release and informal conversations, the four areas covered include business continuity, business process improvement, protection of investment, and total cost of operations.  No public details have yet been provided on the specific metrics but there is an expectation for customers to realize value within a four year time frame of the benchmarking program

  POV: The four areas measure how choice, value, and predictability of investment come together in the overall maintenance offering.  If successful, this represents a unique and transparent approach to demonstrating value in maintenance.  In the coming weeks, SAP users will want to seek details of the specific KPI's and determine how those KPI's will be measured on a consistent basis across different types of organizations.

• Joint benchmarking program to define and measure how SAP customers may derive value from ES. With agreement on the KPI's in place, a formal benchmarking program will be instituted to provide baselines to quantify value.   SAP and SUGEN have agreed on the parameters of the representative customer sample.  SUGEN will choose the customers.   Importantly, an independent party will validate results will conduct quality assurance and independent validation of the results.

  POV: Benchmarking remains the critical factor in this program.  SAP customers should pay close attention for balance in the representative customer sample.  Key variables include level of internal SAP competency, size of organization, complexity of environment, number of instances, industry, and geographic focus.   One can not overemphasize the importance of this program.  The results not only impact future maintenance fee increases, but also provide important benchmark data on SAP operations.

• Changes to the 2008 pricing program for current contracts that may will be migrated to ES. Based on the KPI program, SAP agrees to postpone subsequent price increases pending the realization of targeted improvements measured by the SUGEN KPI's.  These changes have been made to the 2008 pricing program for ES.  Instead of ongoing increases until 2012, the new program ends in 2015.  As stated in the press release "Starting in 2010, the price of SAP Enterprise Support for existing customers will continue to increase based on individual contract terms but will not be higher than a yearly fixed upper cap. This translates to an increase average of no more than 3.1 percent per year from 2010 onwards. The price of SAP Enterprise Support will be capped at 22 percent through 2015. "

  POV:  Two scenarios emerge.  Should the value of ES not be realized, then the price increase will not pass.  However, customers will more likely face a more gradual price increase to the 22%.   This may prove to provide some relief for recession strapped customers.

The bottom line - progress on Enterprise Support issue may result in a win - win for  SAP customers

Expect customers to take the news with cautious optimism.   Should the benchmarks succeed, customers may gain value.  Failure to meet targets meet a freeze on maintenance.  In any case, this is welcomed news and provides a hard fought win-win for the customer and the vendor-client relationship. Congratulations go out to SUGEN and SAP for coming to a common ground!  This shows the importance of preserving independent user groups and the role active users play in shaping the overall agenda.  The one thing left in the choice, value, predictability equation is choice - meaning a tiered maintenance program or access to third party maintenance.  With the less than positive Q1 earnings report announced today, let's wait to see how other chips will fall into place.

Your POV

Do you think SAP met its promise to SUGEN?  Will this help you with your commitment to SAP?  Do you feel SAP has now done the right thing?  Send me a private email to rwang0 at gmail dot com.  Posts are preferred!   Thanks and looking forward to your POV!

For more POV's:

Dennis Howlett - April 28, 2009 "SAP software revenues plummet, announces new deal on maintenance"

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Reposted from http://blog.softwareinsider.org

News Analysis: Oracle Acquires Sun, Enters Open Source and High End Computing Markets

By R "Ray" Wang

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM deal fell through.  Oracle now controls a significant major open source alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).   Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential enterprise solutions for the virtual world.  The deal puts Oracle on a continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise computing stack.  Here's how the stack looks:

• Middleware - While Java and Solaris may appear to be the crown jewels in the deal, Oracle has managed to slowly buy out other stack competitors (i.e. BEA and now Sun) and integrate them into the Fusion Middleware suite of tools for custom development and its own Fusion Applications product lines.   Sun complements BEA.
• Database - Oracle takes out the low cost competitor to SQL server on the low end and gets a shot at converting them to Oracle DB instead of IBM.
• Hardware - Oracle gains another great recurring revenue (maintenance) base with Solaris.  This complements Oracle's large and profitable database installations on Solaris that would have fallen prey to the IBM DB2 team.

The bottom line- Oracle succeeds at post merger integration where others often fail

Despite skepticism, Oracle has made these acquisitions work from a financial perspective, with year-over-year quarterly profit growth that has generally been well above 20%. Some key success factors include:

• Acquiring companies for the recurring revenue. Oracle's first set of deals (i.e., PeopleSoft and Siebel) focused on installed base acquisitions that provided a strong foundation of support and maintenance customers. This base of recurring revenues provided Oracle with the room to continue strong R&D investment while reducing overall costs.  Oracle takes out another highly profitable maintenance base adding pressure to competitors.  In this acquisition it gains the profitable Solaris revenue stream while moving into a maintenance business for open source software.
• Eating its own dog food. In the late 1990s, Oracle made a major commitment to re-engineering its back-office processes using its own applications. As a result, Oracle has become highly efficient, with a ratio of general and administrative expenses to revenues of 3% to 4% - in most calendar quarters, one percentage point lower than SAP's and even lower than other large software vendors like Microsoft and Symantec.  Expect Oracle to put the Sun assets into its arsenal of tools for delivering software innovation.
• Mastering post-merger integration. With two former investment bankers at the helm, Oracle has one of the best post-merger integration teams in the business. Oracle's profit performance signals that it has been able to add new companies and their stream of revenues while keeping costs down.   Sun will provide considerable synergies in the short and long run.

Your POV

What do you think abou the acquisition of SUN?  Did you count on SUN as your open source stack alternative to the Big 4? Send me a private email to rwang0 at gmail dot com.  Posts are preferred!   Thanks and looking forward to your POV!

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Reposted from http://blog.softwareinsider.org

Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push Into Data Warehousing Appliances

By James Kobielus

Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner — and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business” — i.e., running on someone else’s hardware — then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.

But today’s Oracle announcement is the real deal. Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business — and hitting the DW industry like an earthquake. I’ll let my Forrester colleagues blog on the other implications of this deal — for the open source, Java, middleware, SOA, and other markets that Sun is in — and give you a few quick thoughts on the deal’s implications for the DW market.

For starters, this deal will give Oracle the ability to engineer a completely integrated DW appliance composed of all Oracle components, including hardware and software. Now Oracle will be able to take on Teradata and IBM — both of which have long offered their own integrated solutions — more aggressively with high-performance DW offerings. Just as important, Oracle will be able to leverage Sun’s manufacturing scale economies to bring its all-Oracle DW appliances below the $25K-per-terabyte threshold needed for penetration into the midmarket.

Also, Oracle will now have another widely adopted transactional database, the open-source MySQL, that it can — and should — consider tweaking and packaging on an DW appliance. To the extent that Oracle gives customers a choice of DBMSs on a DW appliance platform, it can gain a differentiator that Teradata, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and Netezza lack (you have to go to a startup such as Dataupia for multi-DBMS choice on an appliance). Many information managers prefer to stick with their existing DBMSs when building a DW, and prefer to implement that DW on an appliance to take advantage of its out-of-the-box balanced configuration of CPU, memory, storage, and I/O.

Furthermore, Oracle is acquiring a hardware and operating system vendor that has long been one of the primary platforms on which its own DW/DBMSs, middleware, and tools have been deployed. This acquisition can only be welcome news for joint Oracle-Sun DW customers who have worried about Sun’s solvency for some time now and began to sweat serious bullets when IBM failed to emerge as a white knight. For many Sun customers, an Oracle-powered DW platform will now look like a safer bet than ever.

Of course, there are clear risks in this pending acquisition.

First, a combined Oracle/Sun sows uncertainty among the DW appliance vendors — such as Greenplum and ParAccel — who have partnered with Sun and now find themselves in earnest “co-opetition” with full-competitor (and then some) Oracle.

Second, Oracle’s other DW appliance hardware partners — including HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell — must be concerned that Oracle will now shift focus away from their respective appliance products in favor of those it builds with its own Sun hardware group.

And finally, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun — and possible future development of a MySQL DW appliance — may discourage customers from considering third-party DW appliances, such as from Kickfire — that build on MySQL. If that happens, and a market for non-Oracle-branded MySQL DW appliances never takes root, Oracle will be denying its MySQL customers the choice that Oracle Database customers already enjoy. Currently, Oracle Optimzed Warehouse customers can deploy that enterprise DBMS as a DW on their choice of Sun, HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell platforms.

Let’s hope that Oracle makes the most of its pending Sun acquisition. Ellison either misspoke last fall, or was speaking prophecy. Like most DW vendors, Oracle’s destiny is to grow ever more hardware-dependent for its long-term scalability, performance, and optimization story.

Your Opinion Counts! Especially When You Participate!

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

From my inquiries with customer service professionals, I wanted to get a generalized view of where companies are with respect to implementing the very best of customer service initiatives. It's become pretty clear that most are stuggling with outdated technology, systems that are not integrated together, outdated or no knowledge management technology systems, they haven't deployed proactive chat or ventured down the social media path and are unsure of how to document how much these factors are increasing operational costs, reducing customer lifetime value and lowering sales, revenue and profit margins-- or how to make the business case to show that if these types of things were changed-- that the return would be positive and in many cases, very large.

On the flip side, their organizations are expecting them to provide great customer experience despite these huge handicaps.

Time for a Change! Seems like something has to give. Doing things the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity! The question in my mind was how to collect this information I was finding in the inquiries. "How can I help to bridge the gap between what companies must do to provide great customer experiences and where organizations are at?"

Customer Servive and CRM FastForward Innovation Frameworks. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Bill Band created the FastForward Framework for CRM. It seemed one of the best ways to document what we were hearing is to take Customer Service, as a subset of CRM, and ask specific questions that focused on the multi-disciplinary requirement to set customer service up for success. So we created the Customer Service Innovation Framework.

What Can You Do? Take the Customer Service Innovation Surveys! We want you to know that at Forrester, your opinion counts! And your voice will be heard! Not only will you be one of the first to see the results of the survey, but Elisse Gaynor (who covers Customer Service - Field Service) and who has been invaluable in making the survey available to you, will provide you with some extra goodies for participating!

It's our way of thanking you for helping us document and prove to executives what must be done to advance and innovate one of the most important departments in any company- Customer Service... i.e., the department that is the MOST customer-facing groups of all departments...

How Do You Do That?  It only take 10 minutes. This is the first of five surveys. We need you to participate in all 5. Each survey is on a specific aspect of customer service and in total they provide the whole picture required to innovate companies and their customer relationships.

Log on here: Contact Center Agent and Staff Leadership Survey-- Take it Now!http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/index.jsp?PIN=13AWQ4R7PS37V

 

 

The Business Case For A Business Case

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

In covering Customer Service, I have divided the topic into three aspects:

• “Get the Basics Right”
• “Understand the Business of Customer Service"
• “Plan for the Future of Customer Service.”

I just published a document, “How To Win Funding For Your Customer Service Project." Forrester suggests to standardize the process and template for a business case. We use the discipline Total Economic Impact™ to calculate the ROI for an initiative. I’m hearing from a lot of my clients that in order to get their project approved, they need to justify it.

Today I had an inquiry call from a vendor that wanted to know how best to standardize the business justification process. They are finding that they can’t even get a meeting, or if they do, then one of the first sales objections of their clients is, “What is the ROI of this solution?"

Hopefully this doc will help you in creating your business case. Think of four buckets: benefits, costs, risks, and the other advantages that a particular solution offers for the future. Forrester calls this last buck flexibility. One of the most difficult parts of writing a business case is understanding the metrics you’ll use to describe the benefits and assigning value to them.

Questions for You:

• Are you finding that you need to have a business case to justify the changes you want to make to customer service? or other departments?
• What are executives asking for?
• What are you struggling with?

Write and let me know how what you are dealing with!

P.S. In case you haven’t seen some of the docs I’ve written, here’s a link to some of them. Category is listed above.

 “Get the Basics Right”

·         Forrester’s Customer Service Innovation Framework And Self-Assessment The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008

·         Forrester's Customer Service Innovation Capabilities Self-Assessment WorkSheet- Take the Survey and see how you rate! We can provide an online survey to your whole organization to give you a holistic picture of where you are on the continium of providing best practices for customer service.

·         Forrester Wave¿: Interaction-Centric Customer Service Solutions, Q4 '08 vendor comparison tool (This worksheet has a detailed comparison of vendors that focus on customer interaction-channels for instance like eGain, KANA and RightNow Technologies…)

·         Forrester Wave¿: Process-Centric Customer Service Solutions, Q4 '08 vendor comparison tool (This worksheet has a detailed comparison of vendors that focus on customer processes, for instance, vendors like Ciboodle, Pegasystems and Consona CRM…)

·         Forrester Wave¿: Record-Centric Customer Service Solutions, Q4 '08 vendor comparison tool (This worksheet has a detailed comparison of vendors that focus on customer records, for instance vendors like Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle Siebel…)

·        Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business: Five Ways To Deliver Extraordinary Customer Service Agent Interactions

 

 “Understand The Business of Customer Service”

·         Customer Service: A Keystone Of Your Corporate Revenue Strategy 

·         The Economic Necessity Of Customer Service

·         How To Win Funding For Your Customer Service Project: Use The Discipline Total Economic Impact™ To Boost ROI

 

“Plan for The Future of Customer Service”

• The ROI Of Online Customer Service Communities: Social Media Provides Better Customer Service Experiences at Lower Costs - Coming soon in Q2.

Social Media Best Practices for Customer Service- Coming at the end of Q2;Beginning of Q3.

Social Media Customer Service Case Studies: How Vendors are Changing Their Solutions and How Companies are Deploying Social Media Solutions and Transforming Not Only Customer Service, But The Whole Company

How Knowledge Management Makes Agent-Assisted and Self-Service Pay-off in Better Customer Experiences and Lower Operational Costs

When Were You (Happily) Surprised By Customer Service?

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

I was getting ready to go to the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on April 1st when I realized alot of the hotels were already booked. Not sure where to stay, a friend suggested I call the Pick Wick Hotel. If you haven't met me before, you know I believe companies live or die by their customer service. They had rooms. Whew! Holding my breath I asked the price. It was $108.00. I asked if the price included a bed. They laughed.

I looked at the schedule again, I saw that Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang was speaking on Wednesday morning. Wanting to support my colleague, I thought I would check to see if they had rooms for Tuesday and Wednesday night. Thursday was Clara Shih's book signing party. Friday I was scheduled to meet with Lithium and Jive. There was more to do than the time allotted. Yes, they did have rooms. Wow! And — drum roll... the price was $84. Every night I added, the price went down. I asked about wireless internet. Yes, they had it and it was free.

Every time I asked a question, I was surprised by the answer. They were fun, nice, and I got everything I needed. The hotel was cozy and I slept well.The conference was great. I'll write more about the conference soon, but what I wanted to focus on was — how surprised I was by the hotel accomodations. I was also surprised that I was surprised.

So my question for you is....

• When was the last time you interacted with a company and were surprised by great service?
• What happened?
• What was surprising?
• Did you call the company back and tell them how happy they made you?

Wouldn't it be an interesting world if we weren't surprised when customer service was extraordinary?

Write me back — I want to hear your stories — about good (or bad) customer service experiences. Don't spare any details. Your examples just may end up in my research!

Dislocation Intelligence In A Brutal Economy

By James Kobielus

It's painful to see the auto, newspaper, construction, financial services, and so many other formerly vibrant sectors of the world economy go down the proverbial tubes. One of the most nauseating realities is when millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and communities in a seeming blink.

I grew up in the perpetually recessionary Detroit area. I'm attuned to the regional dislocations that come from depending too much on an industry that has seen better days. Abandoned storefronts, dilapidated housing, vacant lots, tumbleweed-quiet city streets — all of it evidence of a growing ghost town, telltale signs of a marginal economy that depends on government programs, private charity, and low-wage service jobs. During my college years, I was a policy analyst with an urban coalition in downtown Detroit, and I could see that the slide was long-term and nigh irreversible.

Even in relatively well-off areas such as Washington DC, where I've spent close to a quarter-century, we’re not immune to serious economic dislocations. The National Capital Region, so reliant on federal spending, is likely to feel the brunt of whatever cuts Obama will almost certainly make to close this massive deficit. And even here you can’t escape dislocations in sectors that we all depend on, such as retailing, as evidenced by, for example, the ex-Circuit City big boxes that seem even bigger and boxier now that they’re totally empty.

In recent years, corporations have adopted location intelligence solutions to support their market-entry strategies, such as adding new stores and waging marketing campaigns. They also use these tools — essentially, geographic information systems coupled with predictive modeling — to optimize their footprint in existing markets. And to a lesser extent, they also use location intelligence to plan their exit strategy of closings and retrenchments. But when departures are hasty — such as any Chapter 11 proceeding — all we’re left with are vast tracts of vacant real estate, plus many formerly employed people who must find a way to survive amid ruins. Imagine how a General Motors or Chrysler bankruptcy will hit Detroit — it will be a liquidation to rival Hurricane Katrina in its devastation of a major city.

Dislocation intelligence is something that the leaders of the auto companies — and the Obama administration — should exercise when making the tough decisions to restructure this critical industry. People’s pain should be factored into decisions to close and relocate plants, so that, for example, whole cities — such as Flint, Toledo, and Janesville — can make a smooth exit from over-reliance on this one industry. As part of that effort, urban planners should consider the infrastructure that remains behind, so that, for example, whole regions of a city are not suddenly deprived of hospitals, grocery stores, and other basic amenities. Imagine you’re on welfare and have to somehow go ten miles to buy a loaf of bread.

Mapping tools are just tools, not salvation. Detroit long ago passed a point of no return. The US auto industry will never recover the manufacturing jobs that attracted people from all over the world to southern Michigan, northern Ohio, and other regions.

But we as a country should try to smooth over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off the map.

Healthcare Industry BI Groundhog Day

By Boris Evelson

I am writing this blog on my way back home from www.himss.org show in Chicago, while a tingly chill crawls down my back. It’s a creepy feeling of déjà vu. Even worse, it feels like the movie Groundhog Day where the main character keeps waking up on the same day, same date, never able to get to tomorrow. Everything he was able to achieve during the day is erased, and he has to do it over, and over, and over again. This was the feeling I got as I walked the show floor and kept asking myself questions such as:

• Where are the open technology standards?
• Where is the transparency?
• Where is the common sense that business requirements, not vendors, dictate the rules?

I thought we addressed all these basic truths decades ago? Ah, forgive me, I must’ve been thinking about the wrong industry. I was talking about the Financial Services vertical, where after the dark ages of 70’s and 80’s, we finally entered the renaissance age of enlightenment, standards, openness, and transparency. Well, while we may be past the King Arthur times in Healthcare IT, we are not too far from it, probably just approaching the days of Charlemagne trying to unify Western Europe.

As I explored the Healthcare IT show I found the state of industry BI where

• Errors abound! Information Management Systems and CPOE (Computerized Physicians Order Entry) applications account for a staggering 84% of 43,372 USP MEDMARX Computer Technology-Related Harmful Errors (2006)
• Proprietary, closed architectures still rule. Hospital information management applications are often based on hierarchical databases that do not speak common query languages like SQL or MDX — the basis for all modern BI tools (even though some BI tools are beginning to roll out XQuery language functionality capable of reporting from XML data structures). Even worse, most of these applications are not architected with separate data and application logic tiers. Sounds familiar?
• There is no data transparency. Applications with proprietary, hidden data models do not allow for a plug-and-play interface with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), CDC (Change Data Capture), or other standard data integration technologies. Such an environment breeds a swarm of small consultancies founded by ex-developers of these proprietary, closed hospital information applications. They take advantage of the insider scoop on how the guts of these applications work, and make a living building custom interfaces for their clients.
• Standards are incomplete. Data exchange standards like HL7 only work for about 80% of the content (and that's for administrative, but even less so for clinical data) — the rest must be custom integrated every time.
• Huge chunks of MDM are missing. MDM (Master Data Management) — a key to effective BI applications — works mostly for patient information, and maybe billing codes, but not for anything else, like drugs (good luck trying to find a standard code for 200mg ibuprofen gel coated caplets), conditions, and treatments (there is no such thing as a “standard treatment” for a particular ailment — it is all subjective). For example, one senior Healthcare IT manager tells me that Glucose test is coded differently in every single lab system she looked at, so her team spent countless hours coding mapping tables.
• The world is very vendor-, not user-centric. True, most of the state-of-the-art (translation for those unfamiliar to the world of Healthcare IT: state-of-the-art = proprietary) healthcare IT applications are very powerful and function rich, but few of the vendors I talked to seemed to care about integrating with other vendor applications.

As a result, all of the healthcare IT execs I managed to pry away from listening to yet another pitch from a vendor that was all about “Me! Me! Me!” named three top challenges that they all face every day: integration, integration and integration. Another Healthcare IT executive tells me that it took them about 3 months to write database, application and GUI logic for their hospital EMR system, but it is taking them years and years (still going strong) to integrate pharmacy and lab data even within their own hospital network! She defines standards like HL7 purely as communication standards, not content standards, the lack of which is the real culprit. Until this status quo changes, I do not see a bright future for such noble and highly needed industry initiatives as:

• Nationwide integrated Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
• Translational Research — linking patient care and pharmaceutical research applications, processes and data
• Pay For Performance — Medicare and Medicaid driven mandates to link procedures and treatments to the actual improved health conditions of the patients

There’s no rocket science behind these initiatives and drivers, but they will not materialize until the ice of proprietary and closed architectures is broken. What will it take to change all that? Surely not the $19B of questionable spending that the Obama administration is throwing at the problem (which is really just an extension of http://www.hhs.gov/healthit/ initative started by the Bush administration back in 2004). Just look at the $22B that UK allocated in 2002 to similar initiatives to transform its National Health Service information infrastructure. Proving once again that federally managed projects seldom work, in January 2009 the British Committee of Public Accounts (similar to the US GAO) released a less than stellar progress report citing four to five year delays, major contractors bowing out of the projects, and, most importantly, eroding support from the key stakeholders — physicians, dissatisfied with “essential systems that are late or when deployed, do not meet the expectations of clinical staff”. Surely, we should learn from the mistakes of others, not our own.

No, nothing short of free market competition and an IT practitioners revolt will change that. And there’s hope and light at the end of the tunnel:

• Battle hardended industry veterans are entering the industry. I did see a lot of familiar faces at the show from IBM, Informatica, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, SAP, and Sybase. I know that these vendors believe in open architectures and transparent design, so hopefully the rest of the industry will learn form them. I hope that IT managers will see the benefits of these open, interoperable technologies, where integration is a no-brainer, start migrating towards them, and leave the proprietary and closed solutions in the dark ages where they belong.
• There’s tons of competition. I counted at least several hundred vendors at the show! And competition breeds health and innovation, especially when independent research vendors, like www.KLASresearch.com are beginning to provide some transparency. They poll end users and IT staff for their opinion on usability, functionality, stability and other ratings of these proprietary systems — so such vendors cannot hide behind closed doors for long. Just wait till I do a Forrester Wave on these vendors!
• This is truly a life and death opportunity! Failure is not an option here. Various studies like the one published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine continually show direct relationship between poor IT and patients' lives! This particular study found that even a 10% increase in automation of clinical notes and records resulted in 15% reduction in patient deaths (data from 41 Texas hospitals involving over 150,000 patients).

What can you, a Business Process and Application (BP&A) professional, do? While I could write a series of epic novels about everything you could do you improve the state of Healthcare IT, I have to get onto my flight in a few minutes, so I will be merciful and just share my point of view on a few BI specifics:

• BI is not a panacea, but it's a start. True, BI is useless until data is clean, integrated and aggregated. But you should not wait for that to happen before implementing your BI solutions. Just the opposite. Use BI as a perfect tool to start exposing your data problems, and demonstrate to key stakeholders what data issues you have and how you can start addressing them. Results from BI reports are a great supporting evidence for justifying data integration project budgets.

• Leverage our BI related Waves. Use and leverage Forrester's BI Wave, ETL Wave, and DW Wave when evaluating Healthcare BI solutions. If data integration, data cleansing, data warehouse, reporting, OLAP, and dashboard tools are not built on one of these standard and open technologies, that’s a huge red flag! At the very least, use the criteria in our Waves to evaluate, score, and rate the BI vendors you are shortlisting.

• If it’s not plug-and-play, it’s probably bad news. Use compatibility and out-of-the-box integration with these leading BI tools and platforms as a measuring stick to evaluate other Healthcare IT applications. If you see that you need to write “custom” scripts to extract data from the application so that one of these leading BI tools can be used to analyze the data — that's another big red flag. Remember, you are in the business of improving (and even saving!) patients’ lives, or analyzing the performance of your healthcare provider, and not in the business of developing custom scripts and extracts.

Obama Gave The Queen An iPod — This Matters To HR, Why?

By Zach Thomas

We can learn a lot from this simple (now complicated by the press) gesture. In my mind, President Obama was offering a personal gift that, if loaded with the right content, could emote policy, good will, and intentions unavailable due to the limited time he, she, and the rest of the world leaders are afforded.

This might be a stretch, but I think Obama was onboarding — at a much higher level of course.

So boil this down to your organization. We all know that the most important part of onboarding is socialization — basically building relationships, finding a mentor, figuring out corporate culture, and understanding corporate goals.

What if every new employee in your organization was given an iPod loaded with company lore/history, testimonials from employees, visionary wisdom from leadership, success stories, etc.?

Remember the last time you took a new job? You were psyched or at least curious. And I bet you would have listened to the iPod on the drive/train/bus/walk home after your first day of work.

And that’s the key to successful HR initiatives — engagement.

An added bonus: your company could load it with tons of valuable training content (and if you are smarter than me you could figure out how to make new hires view/listen to this info prior to full iPod functionality).

Plus new hires have a new iPod — see good will above.

Inmon’s Vitriolic Slap At “Virtual Data Warehousing” Does Not Withstand Scrutiny

By James Kobielus

In a recent article, Bill Inmon incinerates a strawman concept that he refers to as “virtual data warehousing (DW).” For those unfamiliar with Inmon, he is generally considered the founder of DW as a data management discipline, has been at it since the 70s, and has more published books and articles to his name than most mortals. So he clearly may be considered an authority on the topic of DW.

But methinks Mr. Inmon doth protest too much on this “virtual DW” bugaboo, however defined (we’ll get to that in a moment). Also, he attacks this concocted notion with such emotional vehemence that it’s clear he considers it a threat to the centralized EDW paradigm upon which he has built his career and reputation.

For starters, his definition of this concept is oddly vague and questionably narrow: “a virtual data warehouse occurs when a query runs around to a lot of databases and does a distributed query.” Essentially, Inmon defines “virtual DW” as the ability to a) farm out a query to be serviced in parallel by two or more distributed databases, b) aggregate and join results from those databases, and c) deliver a unified result set to the requester.

That’s an important query pattern, but not the only one that should be supported under (pick your quasi-synonym) data federation, data virtualization, or enterprise information integration (EII) architectures. Inmon’s definition excludes the many federated queries that may only hit on a single database, with no joins and results aggregation, and with the EII fabric handling the necessary on-demand transformation from that source’s schema to an abstract semantic model.

Per my data federation report from last fall, Forrester has a broader perspective on the topic than does Mr. Inmon. Data federation is any on-demand approach that queries information objects from one or more sources; applies various integration functions to the results; maps the results to a source-agnostic semantic-abstraction model; and delivers the results to requesters. Nothing in the scoping of data federation necessarily requires the multi-source aggregation and joining that Inmon puts at the heart of “virtual DW.”

Putting Inmon’s narrow scoping of “virtual DW” behind us for the moment, let’s consider his chief objections to this approach. First, it requires the “analyst to integrate data” (as if that’s something analysts are ill-suited for or regard as some inordinate burden). Second, it consumes resources, experiences suboptimal performance, and “shuffles a lot of data around the system that otherwise would not need to be moved” (as if centralized DWs don’t consume resources, experience performance bottlenecks, and move data). Third, it is “limited to the [historical] data found in the [source] databases.” Fourth, it suffers from “no reconcilability of data...[hence] no single version of the truth for the corporation.”

It’s a fairly straightforward matter to dispatch these objections:

First, data integration--through ETL, EII, and other approaches--is a core job function for DW professionals, not some alien function outside their core competency.

Second, data federation is often the optimal approach for low-latency BI (just check out the case studies in my data federation and really urgent analytics reports). Federated environments can be tuned to provide top-notch performance and minimize source-system impacts when “shuffling” data around in a decentralized fabric.

Third, the source databases in a federation environment often include DWs, which, per their core function, usually manage a considerable amount of historical data. Once again, see my data federation report with discussion of case studies for a) Federation of Local DWs via Centralized EII Infrastructure and b) Federation of Dispersed EDW and ODS Data Into Siloed BI Environments.

Fourth, data federation is not totally incompatible with data reconciliation. In fact, federation environments can be architected for single version of the truth, data governance, and master data management. However, it can indeed be tricky to manage data quality in federated environments (see Rob Karel’s coverage of MDM and DQ for a deep dive on that issue).

My basic objection to Inmon’s line of discussion is that he treats data federation as mutually exclusive from the enterprise DW (EDW), when in fact they are highly complementary approaches, not just in theory but in real-world deployments. Yes, data federation can be deployed as an alternative to traditional EDWs, providing direct interactive access to online transactional processing (OLTP) data stores. However, data federation can also coexist with, extend, virtualize, and enrich EDWs, as well as other data-persistence nodes such operational data stores (ODS) and online analytical processing (OLAP) data marts. The case studies in the cited reports bear that out.

Inmon’s arguments are worth consideration. The centralized EDW model he touts is useful for illuminating some traditional best practices. But by no means can it do justice to the stubbornly heterogeneous, distributed, mixed-latency BI and DW requirements of most enterprises.