Instrumenting Your Enterprise for Maximum Predictive Power

By James Kobielus

Business is all about placing bets and knowing if the odds are in your favor.

As I noted in my most recent Forrester report, business success depends on your company being able to visualize likely futures and take appropriate actions as soon as possible. You must be able to predict future scenarios well enough to prepare plans and deploy resources so that you can seize opportunities, neutralize threats, and mitigate risks.

Clearly, predictive analytics can play a pivotal role in the day-to-day operation of your business. It can help you focus strategy and continually tweak plans based on actual performance and likely future scenarios. And, as I noted in a recent Forrester blog post, the technology can sit at the core of your service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy as you embed predictive logic deeply into data warehouses, business process management platforms, complex event processing streams, and operational applications.

The grand promise of predictive analytics—still largely unrealized in most companies—is that it will become ubiquitous, guiding all decisions, transactions, and applications. For the technology to rise to that challenge, organizations must move toward a comprehensive advanced analytics strategy that integrates data mining, content analytics, and in-database analytics. Already, we’ve sketched out a vision of “Service-Oriented Analytics,” under which you break down silos among data mining and content analytics initiatives and leverage these pooled resources across all business processes.

You may agree that this is the right vision but have doubt about whether there is a practical, incremental roadmap for taking your company in that direction.  In fact there is, and it starts with re-assessing the core of most companies’ predictive analytics capability: your data mining tools. As you plan your predictive analytics initiatives, you should avoid the traditional approach of focusing on tactical, bottom-up project-specific requirements. You should also try not to shoehorn your requirements into the limited feature set of whatever modeling tool you currently happen to use.

To become a fully predictive enterprise, you will need to take both a top-down and bottom-up approach to your data mining initiatives. From the top-down, it’s all about building and integrating alternate models of how your business environment is likely to evolve internally and externally. In our recent report on advanced analytics, Boris Evelson, Leslie Owens, and I sketched out the many business processes that can be enriched by predictive analytics.

So how do you instrument your company to become more predictive? For starters, assess whether your analytics tools support the following capabilities for developing, validating, and deploying predictive models:

• Model multiple business scenarios: You should be able to build complex models of multiple, linked business scenarios across different business, process, and subject-area domains, using such key features as strategy maps, ensemble modeling , and champion-challenger modeling.
• Incorporate multiple information types into models: You should be able to develop models against multiple information types, including unstructured content and real-time event streams, while leveraging state-of-the-art algorithm in sentiment analysis and social network analysis.
• Leverage multiple statistical algorithms and approaches in models: You should be able to develop models using the widest, most sophisticated range of statistical and mathematical algorithms and approaches, including regression, constraint-based optimization, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and support vector machines.
• Apply multiple metrics of model quality and fitness: You should be able to score and validate model quality using multiple metrics and approaches, including quality scores, lift charts, goodness-of-fit charts, comparative model evaluation, and auto best-model selection.
• Employ multiple variable discovery and assessment approaches: You should be able to build and validate models using various approaches for variable discovery, profiling, and selection, including decision trees, feature selection, clustering, association rules, affinity analysis, and outlier analysis.

How is this different from predictive analytics as usual? Traditionally, most predictive modeling specialists focus on the latter three capabilities: statistical algorithms and approaches, model quality and fitness, and variable discovery assessment. Most models are built in narrowly scoped business or subject domains—such as customer analytics for marketing campaign management—and only against structured data sources (such as relational tables). Traditionally, few predictive analytics projects have entailed modeling of multiple business scenarios across diverse domains--such as sales, marketing, customer service, manufacturing, and supply chain-- though in the real world these business processes are often quite interconnected. Also, many data mining initiatives fail to incorporate information from unstructured sources—such as text in call-center logs—though this content may be as important as what comes relational databases and other structured sources.

It’s very important to build multi-scenario predictive models against complex information sets, but becoming a fully predictive enterprise demands much more. To instrument your organization for maximum predictive power, you should also tool your advanced analytics to support the following capabilities:

·         DW-integrated data preparation: To speed up and standardize the most time-consuming predictive modeling project tasks, you should be able to leverage your existing data warehouse, extract transform load, data quality, and metadata tools to support a full range of data preparation features. These features include the ability to discover, acquire, capture, profile, sample, collect, collate, aggregate, deduplicate, transform, correct, augment, and load analytical data sets.

·         Deep application and middleware integration: To deliver models deeply into whatever heterogeneous SOA-enabled platform you happen to use, your predictive analytics tool should deploy on and/or integrate with a wide range of enterprise applications, middleware, operating platforms, and hardware substrate. You should be able to deploy models seamlessly into your data warehouse, business intelligence, online analytical processing, data integration, complex event processing, data quality, master data management, and business process management environments. And to play well in your SOA, your predictive modeling tools should support application programming interfaces, languages, tools, and approaches such as Web services, Java, C++, and Visual Studio, as well as emerging languages such as SQL-MapReduce and R.

·         Consistent cross-domain model governance: To avoid fostering an unmanageable glut of myriad models, your predictive analytics solution should support a wide range of tools, features, and interfaces to support life-cycle governance of models created in diverse tools. At the very least, your tools should enable model check in/check-out, change tracking, version control, and collaborative development and validation of models. To realize this promise, it should support a full range of tools, standards, and interfaces for import and embedding of models from other tools, as well as export and sharing of models to other environments.

·         Flexible model deployment: To execute modeling functions--such as data preparation, regression, and scoring—on the widest range of data warehouses and other platforms, your tools should support in-database or embedded analytics. And to scale to the max, your predictive analytics tools should deploy models to massively parallel data warehouses, software-as-a-service environments, and cloud computing fabrics.  Your advanced analytics tools should also support development of application logic in open frameworks—such as MapReduce and Hadoop—to enable convergence of data mining and content analytics in the cloud.

·         Rich interactive visualization: To deliver their precious payload—actionable intelligence—your advanced analytics tools should support interactive visualization of models, data, and results. Ideally, you should be able to visualize all of this in your preferred business intelligence tool, or in the predictive modeling vendor’s integrated visualization layer. Of course, you have every right to expect the full range of visualization techniques--histograms, box plots, heat maps, etc.—regardless of who provides the visualization layer.

As you can see, this goes well beyond data mining as usual. Forrester has a slightly different perspective on the development of the predictive analytics market than you’re likely to get from other sources. We see a robust, flexible, SOA-enabled data mining tools as the centerpiece of advanced analytics for fully predictive enterprises. The competitive stakes are too great for businesses to take the traditional silo-mired approach when implementing this mission-critical technology.

What do you think?

Efficiency, Sustainability, And Digital Natives Accelerate Paper’s Path To Digital

  By Sheri McLeish

As people spend more time consuming information digitally at home and at work, reliance on paper continues to decrease. But how far are we across the Digital Divide? In 1975, George E. Pake, then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, predicted that in 1995 his office would be completely different: “There will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button. I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy I’ll want in this world.”

Thirty-five years later Pake’s vision largely came true for iWorkers, who today toggle between laptops, smart phones, and other devices to create, consume, and manage information. But an interesting thing happened along the way. With the initial rise in popularity of email and the Internet in the late 1990s, there was actually a bump in paper usage, not a decrease. People printed out their emails, receipts for e-purchases, documents, presentations – you get the idea. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund reported that some 10,000 sheets of paper are used each year by the average office worker in Western industrialized countries.

The other challenge faced by businesses has been the explosion of content types. Firms today need to support and coordinate multiple inbound and outbound channels. For processes like customer onboarding, paper persists due to lack of integration or reliance on paper by customers, partners, and staff. Today only a quarter of enterprises report that 25-50% of their customers are fully paperless, according to a recent Forrester Information Capture survey. Eighty-seven percent of firms have, are in the process of, or are planning to implement or upgrade information capture technology in their companies. The No. 1 investment area? No surprise here: integrating with enterprise apps.

This ongoing effort to remove paper from processes is driven by good, solid business reasons: For each sheet of paper used there are costs for purchasing, storage, copying, printing, labor, postage, disposal, and recycling. The ROI for capture investments is one of the most straight-forward for a technology investment. Driven by cost savings, increased productivity, and improved access and retention of electronic documents, companies continue to invest steadily in information capture to support business processes like registration, invoicing, and contract management.

Most Content Now Born Digital
But there’s another other huge driver of paper reduction in the enterprise: the iWorker. I know I still have a few piles of paper lingering at the office and more at home, but I haven’t looked at that stuff in years. I use my smart phone for a shopping list; I seem to have a hard time locating pens because I so rarely use them.

And I’m not unique. Forrester believes that well over two-thirds of content created today originates digitally. Consider:

• In our Forrester Workforce Analysis Survey, Q2 2009, 79% responded that they use word processing tools, and 60% report using word processing daily.
• Spreadsheets have similar but slightly lower use, with about half of information workers using spreadsheets daily.
• From the same study iWorkers are shown to be pretty happy with word processing tools – 82% indicate high satisfaction

This high level of satisfaction and ongoing use of tools to work with content in digital form supports the notion that most of the content being handled by iWorkers today is in electronic formats. And this will accelerate as Millennials who were “born digital” make up greater proportions of the workforce.

It’s Getting Easier To Be Green
Paper reduction also fits into the Green mindset. Along with embracing digital authoring tools, iWorkers indicate a strong desire to reduce paper in the workplace (75% strongly agree) and recognize the benefits of digital content such as facilitating quicker distribution and ability to reuse content. Paper-based or whiteboard content from collaborative work sessions increasingly are moving to the digital realm. During a tour of EMC’s storage manufacturing facility last week several of the process efficiencies touted were tied to digitizing information collection, including a widescreen digital whiteboard on the shop floor to replicate a physical whiteboard and an application that provides electronic access to the state of components as they are being tested, a task that previously required the technicians to walk through the test rooms and write down the information to then be inputted.

Custom development to automate and digitize manual processes remains core to ongoing process improvement. But for more informal content development, eventually iWorkers will take for granted originating this content digitally. Today adoption of wikis and blogs is still nascent, with under 10% of information workers using these tools. But as collaborative environments become more accessible via Web-based platforms like the Google Wave, Novell’s Pulse, IBM/Lotus Live, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and Office 2010, it will become even easier to live fully in a digital world of content.

Holdouts Hindered By Real Hurdles
There will be exceptions to the digital rule, however. Content captured via paper forms or that isn’t well supported for electronic input, such as math formulas or diagrams, will persist until better user interfaces make even these uses obsolete on paper. Most iWorkers today are not provisioned a stylus and tablet PC, so doing a first pass on paper or on a whiteboard remains faster even if eventually these drawings need to be captured digitally.

And there will be other holdouts as well: In an interview with NPR earlier this year, one of our era’s most prolific novelists James Patterson admitted he does all of his writing in longhand before turning it over to an assistant to be typeset. But in college classrooms, often the best barometer for what’s to come, more and more professors are allowing laptops and electronic note taking tools to be used in class. And as we look even further ahead, consider that penmanship has taken a backseat to keyboarding in the elementary curriculum at many schools. So for the class of 2025, Forrester predicts that their offices may not be just sans paper, but without a pen too. I guess that puts me ahead of the curve.

What about you? Are you farther along the paperless trail at home or at work? What’s driving paper reduction in your firm? What’s holding you back?

Social means business

by Rob Koplowitz

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference we found more evidence of the changing nature of enterprise collaboration. Both customers and vendors provided evidence that social networking was quickly moving into the enterprise landscape and warrants the attention due a potential game changer. There are three trends that warrant attention:

• Forward thinking organizations are developing broad collaboration strategies that embrace social networking while recognizing and managing associated risk. In fact, it is becoming clear that a well managed strategy with regard to social in the enterprise should lower risk associated privacy, security and compliance. Sounds counter-intuitive? Well, transparency is a beautiful thing.
• The vendor landscape is vibrant. At many conferences these days, the standard refrain is "in this economy". Not here. Vendors are investing heavily in new capabilities and are being rewarded with robust business. 
• Businesses are getting real value. The early stage pilots of the last couple of years have proven to be successful and many organizations are moving from concept to broad deployment with high hopes for more and more value. The early adopters are also interesting. Defense, health care, financial services all sharing success stories and proving that risk is manageable even in the most stringent environments.

What does success look like? In almost every case, there are two parts to the story. First, a known process is addressed and the results are positive. It's common to hear stories that begin with " We used to do this in email...". Freeing organizations from the inefficiencies of chasing emails can provide a string starting point to realizing value. (No, email does not go away, it just goes back to doing what it does well which is not content and project management.)

The second part of the story is where the light bulb goes on. Now in fairness, this is generally not a surprise as most organizations PLAN for the light bulb to go on. However, no two organizations see this happen in quite the same way. The moment comes when broad sharing of information leads to a result that could not have happened otherwise. People-centric collaboration leads to the connection of people to content and expertise that they otherwise would never have found. Communities are very good at driving action because they free information and create a context for collective action. Sound a bit too fluffy? The wins are anything but. That's why the most traditional and risk averse organizations got up at Enterprise 2.0 and outlined their successes and plans to move forward.

Forrester predicts that social computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so your organization can begin to understand these transformational benefits. Where do you begin:

• Engage with a motivated business leader to create a pilot. Outline the criteria for success. Make it concrete but realize that it will be hard to measure exactly. "We expect to reduce the cost of proposal generation by 30%" is going to be difficult to prove. "We expect to have better access to information and expertise to get our jobs done" is too high level to be taken seriously. "We expect to be able to produce proposals more quickly and with higher quality" is just right. Why? Because your business sponsor can attest to that result and the result will be taken seriously.
• Start small. There is ample opportunity to this at a very low cost and with a small, albeit motivated, number of resources. Prove the value before moving to larger roll outs. Keep in mind that even a small pilot will require cooperation from some parts of your organization that might be skeptical, like legal and HR. Get them on board from the beginning.
• Plan for pervasive adoption. In the long run, the real wins will come from communities that self-identify how to determine value. Be prepared for huge serendipitous wins. The broader information is shared and the more widely networks connect, the more wins that will result.

And, you get to have fun.

"He don't know it's a d---- show, he thinks it a d---- fight"

By Rob Koplowitz

Great line from Rocky, one of my favorite movies, as Apollo Creed's manager recognizes that the underdog needs to be taken more seriously. In this particular scenario Cisco is the underdog. I'm currently listening to Cisco's vision for collaboration and in this market, they are an underdog. Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla and IBM is a pretty big beast as well. In a market dominated by a small number of software powerhouses, why do we want to take Cisco seriously? For a few reasons:

1. The market is going through multiple disruptions: the move to the cloud, the move to unified communications, the increasingly pervasive adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, etc. A market in disruption is an opportunity.
2. Cisco is already a player. Really. WebEx is a big part of many organization's collaboration portfolio and was the first commercially successful SaaS based collaboration offering. They own a lot of eyeballs and they are good at SaaS. The Jabber acquisition was a key move that is just beginning to show full value by delivering standards based presence and IM across the entire portfolio.
3. The network. There I said it and I don't think it's because I accidentally drank some kool-aid here at the event. By controlling content and communication artifacts at the network level there are some very interesting benefits. Cisco is already talking about the ability to track keywords, "tags", at the network level. How far can this be taken in the direction of driving policy and governance at the network level and make it an underlying service to multiple collaboration applications. 
4. Cisco is good at acquiring and integrating companies and their technologies, so they may will continue to fill out the breadth of their collaboration portfolio. 
5. Video is an emerging killer application and there is a lot open field to run in and Cisco is in a great position to take advantage of the opportunity.

The bottom line is that when Cisco enters your market in a meaningful way, and they are highly committed, you take them seriously. That said, they will face challenges:

1. The big boys that dominate the market aren't going to rollover and play dead. Microsoft and IBM make a lot of money in this market and they have no intention of giving up any revenue opportunity.
2. The stuff has to work well. It's not enough to have a compelling vision and architecture. It needs to be bullet proof for customers. Does Cisco build good stuff? Yes, but they still need to prove that this stuff, a lot of which is new, works.
3. Can they sell it? The dog is networking, the tail is collaboration and that will always be the case at Cisco. Sometimes companies can overcome their legacy and enter new markets, sometimes they can't. Sales forces and channels need to be realigned and that is not always easy.

Everyone loves a good fight. This one could be very interesting.

Exchange 2010: Five Good Reasons To Upgrade

  by Ted Schadler

Microsoft announced the general availability of Exchange Server 2010 yesterday. For information & knowledge management professionals and for the productivity of information workers, there are five good reasons to upgrade:

1. Much cheaper storage. Exchange 2007 introduced a new storage model, where the email server manages direct-attached storage. Exchange 2010 extends that capability and in the words of one beta customer, "We have reduced the overall costs for our storage by 30% while increasing the usable disk space nine times." This benefit comes from using cheap direct-attached storage in lieu of storage area networks.
2. Support for much bigger mailboxes. Most firms limit mailbox size to 100-250 MB for good reasons: storage cost, nightly backup windows too short, eDiscovery hassles. Exchange 2010 has much faster I/O (Microsoft says 15 times faster than in Exchange 2003) and improved storage management that allows direct-attached storage and cheap disks. Net it out, and it becomes much easier to expand the mailboxes to 1-2 GB.
3. Cloud or on-premises: you decide. Exchange 2010 is natively multi-tenant, which makes it easier to run in the cloud. A single administration console makes it possible for firms to run some mail boxes on-premises and some in the cloud. And with a price war going on with cloud-based email, the cost of an Exchange 2010 mailbox in the cloud just dropped to $5 with a big mailbox.
4. High-availability and archiving features. In classic style, the company has enhanced Exchange to bring in features that were previously only available in third-party products. Site-level replication and basic archiving will displace some add-on products for some customers at least.
5. Full fidelity with three different browsers. Not everyone uses Outlook, and even Outlook users sometimes need browser access to email. With Exchange 2010, Microsoft is delivering on its commitment to rich Internet applications on multiple browsers. As with the Office 2010 Web applications, Exchange 2010 supports IE, Firefox, and Safari.

Seen other things? Have concerns? Please comment.

Cisco's Collaboration Strategy: Coming Through The Network Door

  by Ted Schadler

Cisco's John Chambers has made "collaboration" a strategy for the company's customers and employees. And enterprise GM Tony Bates is now tasked with driving that strategy. I'm writing from Cisco's launch event in San Francisco. (Well, it's actually still going on.)

There's a lot to digest and analzye, which we'll do over time. But I wanted to share some early thoughts . . .

This week's announcement marks Cisco's formal entry into the broader collaboration market, long fragmented and dominated by IBM and Microsoft for applications and by Tandberg and Polycom for video conferencing.

The company claims 61 products and features, but the key components are email, instant messaging, web conferencing, social software, and video conferencing as well as network-based services like a business TelePresence directory and policy-controlled content tagging. And in the words of Tony Bates, "a video stream runs through all of it."

Cisco's strategy for collaboration fascinates me because it's bold and frankly orthogonal to Microsoft's desktop productivity path and IBM's workgroup history. It's also enterprise-grade by default, unlike Google's consumer-first approach. But I'm fascinated and I believe IT pros should be interested in Cisco's solutions for three reasons:

• First, Cisco is tackling tackling collaboration from the network up. Instead of building on an architecture of installed software and applications, Cisco is starting with the network. This makes possible global cloud services, new content tagging services, video interoperability, any-device support, and business-to-business services.

• Second, only Cisco has the video stream running through it. I believe that video is a game changer for distributed teams. And by video, I mean video conferencing from the desktop to the conference room PLUS recorded video for sharing PLUS video distribution and interoperability across carriers, networks, and devices. And only Cisco can do that today.

• Third, Cisco has demonstrated its seriousness with an account acquisition strategy based on price. Cisco's cloud-housted WebEx Mail services goes head-to-head with Microsoft Exchange Online, IBM LotusLive.com, and Google Apps with a 5 gigabyte mailbox for $5/user/month.

While it's very early going for most of this, I think Cisco's in this for the long haul. Cisco's "new commitment" to standards and interoperability and its channel investments and product acquisitions (approaching $4B in the last two years) signal it's seriousness.

Stay tuned for more.

Novell Pulse Lookin' Cool with Google Wave

  by Rob Koplowitz

Novell collaboration has been in the process of an extreme makeover for a while now. It started with the acquisition and subsequest integration  of SiteScape. It continued with new releases of their email offering GroupWise. But, all along they were working on something that would really differentiate their offering in the market. On Wednesday morning they announced Novell Pulse at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I've been watching Pulse move from concept to what is now an announced product with an H1 2010 announced ship date for the better part of two years now. It represents an interesting blend of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and content generation capabilities. If that sounds a bit familiar, think Google Wave. In fact, at the time Wave was announced, I was holding my tongue when folks would ask me if I'd seen anything like it before. I had, the product that became Novell Pulse. I just couldn't say because of a pesky NDA!

Thus it was interesting that Novell became the first vendor in the collaboration space to announce a significant partnership and integration with Google around the upcoming Wave offering. The premise is actually pretty cool. A user in Novell Pulse can work in real-time on a document simultaneously with a user on Google Wave. From the Novell side, all security is managed and maintained by Novell.

In the meantime, Pulse does not stop at being a real-time content generation and collaboration offering. It actually pulls a number of collaboration capabilities together in a single unified user experience, including an email inbox, real-time collaboration including presence, conferencing, co-editing and chat, workspace and social capabilties. The integrated experience allows users to choose the right collaboration experience for the task at hand without the need to switch between applications.

Novell needed to move in a bold direction to catch attention in an increasingly competitive collaboration market. With Pulse they have definitely proven that they're willing to be bold.

100,000 iPhone Apps. Congrats. Now Add Things Businesses Care About

  by Ted Schadler

It had to happen eventually. The success of iPhone (now used by 14% of US, UK, and Canadian smartphone-using information workers) is driven signficantly by "there's an app for that." So that while a huge congratulations! is in order, getting to 100,000 applications available was just a matter of time. Mostly consumer apps, of course, but a growing number of business applications, including Cisco WebEx, Oracle Business Indicators, Roambi's Visualizer data dashboard toolkit, and Salesforce Mobile.

But what IT professionals need, particularly those focused on making information workers productive with smartphones, is much better support for managing custom and prepackaged business applications. (That along with a bunch of things like more robust security, easier device management, stronger encryption, more policy-based control over the device, things that RIM does but the largely Microsoft-controlled ActiveSync solution doesn't. But more on that another time).

Focusing here on applications, it's time for us all to insist that Apple make it easy for IT professionals to:

• Support wireless application downloads.The current iTunes or iPhone Desktop Configurator solution just doesn't cut it for businesses. They need over-the-air download and update capability.

• Push application updates. How else can IT feel confident that a business application will work?

• Configure applications remotely. How else can in-field changes be supported?

• Improve the App Store catalog to filter for things businesses care about. How else can businesses point their employees at the right packaged applications?

RIM sets the bar on most of these requirements with the enterprise-grade BlackBerry Enterprise Server and network. RIM's solution (though sometimes pricey and hard for IT to bill back to the business) works well in even highly regulated or secure industries.

Apple may not want to incur the cost of supporting these enterprise scenarios itself,  but it should at least open the door to third parties like Sybase, BoxTone, and Divitas Networks to do it.

Disagree? Have other requirements? Please comment.

A Third Grade Field Trip To The Apple Store

 by Ted Schadler

When I stopped into an Apple Store in Palo Alto last summer, it was swarming with cute kids in hot pink tee shirts, logoed with the name of a local day camp. Okay, I figured what the heck, 8-year olds learning how Apple's stuff and software works is a cool way to kill a couple of hours.

Then I learned that my eight-year old daughter (self portrait below) was "super excited" to be going on a class field trip to the Apple Store in the local mall. The class of third graders would take the local bus to one side of town and pick up another local bus to the mall (itself an adventure in our car-centric town).

The goal was to learn iMovie, which the kids have access to at school, and to make a movie. Actually, it's a pretty good idea to outsource movie production class to someone else, especially someone passionate about making movies. Regardless of where they are. Smart guy, Mr. C. (her teacher).

But now I'm starting to think that this is a master plan coming from Cupertino, indoctrination through the school system. And it's something that HP and Dell and Microsoft can't replicate right now (though Best Buy could). So I asked my daughter to do some investigative reporting and ask how many school field trips the Apple Store has every month.

Yesterday morning, I came down at 6:30 as usual to let the dog out and empty the dishwasher. Unusually, the kitchen wasn't dark. My eight-year old was already up and ready to rock. "I couldn't go back to sleep, Dad. I was too excited," she bubbled. Ah, the Apple Store awaits.

Last night, she showed off her new Apple tee shirt and also an essay on her favorite part of the field trip. Turns out it wasn't making movies on iPods and iMacs. It was walking into the empty mall and realizing that they had the whole place to themselves. Go figure.

"But I asked your question, Dad. Did you want to know about classes or kids?"

"Field trips," I said.

"Oh, phew," she sighed with relief. "He told me they have 1 to 2 field trips a month."

Okay, maybe not a fully formed education/indoctrination plan just yet. But with 273 stores in the most affluent and highly-traffic shopping venues in the US and beyond, Apple can do just that: give kids some real training on video, photos, communications, presentations. And if it benefits the brand, well that's nothing new in education.

What are your experiences with the Apple Store?

IBM Gets Smart With Its Archiving Strategy

  by Brian W. Hill

IBM’s announcement this week outlining the vendor’s archiving vision and strategy is ambitious and far reaching in scope. It’s encouraging to see IBM working across its different internal divisions to deliver solutions that address specific enterprise needs (e.g., message archiving, file system archiving, and SharePoint archiving) while providing a framework and a set of capabilities for broader enterprise archiving.

My initial feedback on IBM’s strategic announcements is positive. Here’s why:

• Information and technology chaos reign today. Enterprises struggle with IT environments comprised of multiple, fragmented archiving, records management, and eDiscovery applications. Historically, organizations have deployed these applications to address specific needs such as message archiving to improve operational performance or records management to meet regulatory requirements for physical records. But because these deployments have typically evolved organically and in isolation from one another, enterprises grapple with fragmentation, with disparate systems that lack consistent policies and entail significant ongoing TCO and legal risk. In our Q3 2009 survey, 60 percent of records management stakeholders rated synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving during the eDiscovery process as “challenging” or “very challenging.” IBM clearly understands this scenario and is aligning its offerings and messaging to meet these enterprise needs.
• Portfolio providers bring advantages in comparison with point solution providers. Across its software, hardware, and services offerings, IBM brings a lot to the table for enterprises with archiving needs. In selling archiving solutions, IBM competes with a range of providers, including many who specialize in archiving for a specific content type or application (e.g., messaging or SAP). What’s especially compelling about IBM’s strategic announcement is the broad range of functionality that IBM plans to support across structured and unstructured content. IBM’s capabilities to rationalize IT infrastructure and harmonize policies (e.g., retention, storage management, etc.) for a range of applications and content types provides the vendor with potential competitive advantages in comparison with point solution specialists.
• Flexible deployment options are key. IBM isn’t positioning its smart archive strategy as a single massive deployment approach. That’s good, because contemplating – let alone deploying – a single enterprise-wide approach to archiving is a daunting task. Instead, with this announcement, IBM describes set of specific solutions for archiving, records management, and eDiscovery in conjunction with a broader unified, information aware strategy. Rolling out applications sequentially, on an as-needed basis, and in the context of a coherent strategic archiving approach resonates with Forrester clients. Enterprises report that cross-repository capabilities like federated records management are becoming more important. This functionality, along with consistent ingestion and classification technologies, are important to IBM’s strategic approach.
  In addition to traditional on-premise software, IBM’s approach also focuses on other deployment models including pre-configured appliance, software-as-a-service, cloud ready and hybrid options. These flexible options should provide customers the ability to cut deployment times and may drive down overall total cost of ownership.

IBM also announced InfoSphere Content Assessment, a content analytics offering which will enable organizations to assess unmanaged content. With this new product, IBM will help organizations better understand unmanaged content and identify high value content subject to retention management or legal risk mitigation objectives. The offering will also help organizations identify unnecessary content eligible for deletion, supporting the ability to ease storage burdens and improve application performance.

In considering IBM’s strategic approach, however, enterprises should be clear that technology alone won’t translate to success with archiving objectives. Regardless of the deployment model, effective archiving requires early engagement with internal process experts and enterprise end users, in addition to IT and legal stakeholders. Careful change management efforts in conjunction with well-considered plans for retention policies, information architecture, and training, along with workflow and technology integration with records management and eDiscovery applications all play a critical role.

From my standpoint, the vision that IBM outlines in this announcement is strategically compelling. Across its services, software, and hardware assets, IBM has an extensive archiving portfolio. IBM’s archiving customers are today capturing significant storage savings, operational efficiencies, and legal risk mitigation benefits. It’s encouraging to see these assets and IBM’s messaging coming together in the same direction.

In telling this story though, IBM will need to make sure that it doesn’t go overboard in pitching this extensive vision. With varying needs to understand how it fits into the “big picture,” enterprise customers buy archiving technology and services to meet concrete objectives. Overall, it’s clear that aligning IBM archiving and supporting portfolio capabilities holds significant promise for enterprise value. A good set of IBM reference customers (who are holistically using a variety of the offerings described in IBM’s announcement) will go a long way in translating vendor vision to market reality and will play an important role in enterprise buying cycles.