Microsoft Office 2010: The Odyssey Continues

by Sheri McLeish

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding-edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

• Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.                                                                
• Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or  power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
• Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
• Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject  matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.

Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends on Automated Data Discovery

 By James Kobielus

If you tuned into my Forrester teleconference yesterday, you heard me discuss the end-to-end infrastructure necessary to fully support mashup-style self-service business intelligence (BI).

One of the key features for BI mashup is automated source-data discovery, which spares information workers from having to find new data sources or fresh updates from existing sources. Instead, the user simply relies on the BI and back-end data virtualization infrastructure to perform these critical activities as ongoing background tasks. Once new sources and feeds are discovered, transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry, all the user needs to do is drag and drop them visually into their mashed-up reports, dashboards, and other analytics.

Automated discovery is not only key to BI mashup, but to trustworthy data as well, because it helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources. Only a few vendors on the market today provide strong features for automated source discovery. One of them is Composite Software, which recently released an appliance that performs these functions. Another is Exeros, which is the closest thing to an automated-data-discovery pure-play in the market today.

Or, rather, was the closest thing, until IBM announced this morning that it is acquiring Exeros. I’ve been following Exeros for several years and have long considered them a strong candidate for acquisition by a leading BI, data warehousing (DW), data integration (DI), or data quality (DQ) vendor. On IBM’s part, this acquisition makes great sense as a complement to its InfoSphere and Optim portfolios on the data management and governance side of the house.

It will also fit nicely with IBM’s Cognos portfolio as a key enabler, potentially, for BI self-service mashup. As I stated on my teleconference, some vendors are further ahead on putting together a completely mashup-enabling end-to-end BI solution, and Cognos is among them. You can download the teleconference slides from Forrester’s website, listen to my streaming audio, and/or wait for my forthcoming report for more in-depth thoughts on this topic.

Now the ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when, and how they plan to add automated source discovery to their BI portfolios.

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

By James Kobielus

In a recent article, Bill Inmon incinerates a straw man 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.

Obama’s Information Agenda....What Is It And Is There A Role For BI?

By James Kobielus

Wow....what a historic week this has been for the United States and the world.

When President Obama and Vice President Biden take office in January, they will have a very full agenda, a rat’s nest of nasty problems to address right off the bat, and a minefield of absurdly high expectations to navigate.

Being an IT industry analyst, I can’t help but wonder where IT fits into the incoming administration’s list of priorities. Indeed, during the campaign, I wasn’t at all sure that any of the candidates had any coherent positions regarding U.S. IT infrastructure, its role in sustaining American competitiveness, or its ability to help the federal government run more efficiently or connect with the constituents. Clearly, the Internet is a bit more stable right now than the financial services sector, so the candidates knew their priorities.

Nevertheless, IT is key to “change we can believe in,” and was instrumental to Obama’s successful campaign. This raises the issue: Does the incoming administration have an Information Agenda, or an IT agenda, and, if so, what might it be? Well, fortunately, a little bit of digging through the Obama campaign’s website has turned up a very thorough set of positions and promises on all things IT.

The most noteworthy promise reads as follows: “Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.” I’m not going to opine on whether it makes sense to have a national CTO, though, if Obama makes good on this promise, wouldn’t Al Gore make perfect sense in that role--assuming that a former VP wouldn’t see it as a step down in his political career.

But another Obama promise may prove even more important for the future of American political governance: “Open Up Government to its Citizens:.... An Obama presidency will use cutting-edge technologies to ...creat[e] a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens. “ On one level, this suggests an enduring role for BI and performance management technologies in the federal government’s outreach to citizens. What I’m thinking of is some sort of online, continuously refreshed scorecard, dashboard, or report that measures how well the government is serving its constitutents, as measured across many key performance indicators. Or, at the very least, such a scorecard might illustrate how well President Obama is living up to his campaign promises or stacking up against, say, the government’s performance under the outgoing President Bush.

Actually, I’m not entirely sure that an online presidential scorecard would be such a good idea. By its very nature, it would probably be a highly political, partisan, and disputed instrument from the get-go. Judging by the aggressive way in which Obama and the Democrats used the Internet in their campaign, an online presidential scorecard could either become an instrument of ongoing governance or degenerate into a vehicle of perpetual propaganda.

What do you think? Would the U.S. benefit from a national CTO? Would a national online government performance scorecard serve a useful purpose? Would these scorecards, if they established themselves at all levels of government, and as instruments of persuasion in political campaigns, be good or bad for society? And would scorecarding make sense in the political cultures of other nations?

Governance Risk Compliance Agenda....Critical in Turbulent Economy, But Conspicuously Missing from IBM’s IOD Go-To-Market Message

By James Kobielus

If it’s October, it must be time for IBM’s annual Information On Demand (IOD) conference. Initiated 3 years ago, IOD has become an indispensable event for any Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professional who has deployed IBM’s sprawling data management solution portfolio.

And IBM doesn’t disappoint: each annual conference is jampacked with important announcements that improve the vendor’s positioning in the forefront of today’s information-driven economy. If anything, IOD has become so crowded with IBM announcements that some important events or themes can easily be overlooked or given less emphasis than they deserve.

IBM realizes this, which is why the vendor works hard in advance of the show to define a coherent set of themes that not only address key customer requirements but also tie to key new product initiatives or releases. This year, that overarching theme is “Information Agenda,” which, you’ll notice, I blogged on several weeks ago. At heart, Information Agenda refers to IBM’s IOD solution focus: positioning its offerings as key customer enablers for business agility, transformation, optimization, and efficiency.

It’s a great theme: very empowering, hopeful, and solution-focused. But, sitting here at IOD, it occurs to me that another key theme is looming in the background, threatening to eclipse it all. The approaching storm is the worldwide financial meltdown, economic slowdown, and the very real likelihood of sharp cuts in IT budgets everywhere. It manifests itself in the increased economic volatility and risk we all face, and for which we’re all trying to hedge all of our strategies and plans. It’s clamping down on us in the increasing government regulation, control, and monitoring being imposed on a growing swath of the world economy. It will result in government-mandated deployment of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions, which will need to leverage companies’ investments in business intelligence (BI), performance management, and data warehousing (DW) solutions.

Oddly, IBM paid precious little attention to GRC at this year’s IOD--though its Cognos group rolled out  enhancements to its financial performance analytics portfolio,  its enterprise content management (ECM) portfolio enhanced its e-discovery and records management features, and it deepened its already comprehensive Optim portfolio for information lifecycle management (ILM).

And it’s not as if IBM has no GRC strategy. On previous occasions, IBM has put forth a credible strategy that ties its ECM, identity management, and other offerings into a portfolio that is roughly on a function par with Oracle, SAP, and other diversified software vendor.

But not at this year’s IOD. To IBM’s credit, many of their execs discussed the economic climate soberly and insightfully. But nobody, it seemed, wanted to rain on the IOD parade--in which the sunny “business optimization” theme prevailed--by bringing the teeth-gritting GRC theme into it in any way.

My primary beef with Information Agenda? As noted in that previous post, it’s a bit too vague, and a tad too blandly optimistic. Yes, there are always business opportunities, but we’re now in a business landscape where the threats are even more salient.

So, IBM, let’s also discuss customers’ Governance Agendas....their Risk Agendas...their Compliance Agendas...their Demonstrate-to-the-Feds-That-Our-Books-Are-Shipshape Agendas...their Son-of-SarbOx Agendas...their Survive-and-Avoid-Government-Takeover Agendas. How does the IOD portfolio support those agendas?

The big bad recession. Everybody from Ben Bernanke on down says it’s here or coming soon. So why not address it head-on, soberly, with solutions, or, at the very least, approaches that leverage solutions in which customers have already invested?

On a related note, IBM failed to fully address another key concern in a sour economy: cutting IT costs without compromising investments in core BI, analytics, and operational data assets. On the DW appliance side of the equation, IBM did not present a strategic response to recent announcements by Oracle and Teradata, under which those competitors are now providing highly affordable petabyte-scale DW solutions. IBM has strong DW appliance offerings in its InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse portfolio, but it had no new announcements that match Oracle’s and Teradata’s big splashes.

So, if anything, those were the prime disappointments at this year’s IOD show. It was a missed opportunity for IBM both to counter the competition and also address a key concern of its budget- and survival-stressed I&KM customers.

Agenda Politics -- Information Shifts The Balance Of Policy And Influence In Any Organization

By James Kobielus

Yes, like anyone who got a liberal arts degree (me: B.A., Economics), I had to take Political Science 101. And like anyone who sat and thought about what exactly politics is, I soon realized that it's anything but a science. Some call it the "art of the possible," and that strikes me as exactly right.

Or, more to the point, it's the art of engineering consensus and coalition around issues, leading (hopefully) to effective action. Which brings me to the one useful kernel of wisdom that I took away from Poli Sci 101: that the most effective coalition builders are those who engineer a clear, compelling agenda for shaping collective action over the long run. Ironically, Al Gore may have had a greater, lasting impact on the world by losing the 2000 election than if the U.S. Electoral College, Supreme Court, and Floridian perforations had all swung his way. He spearheaded a powerful agenda-based coalition of considerable momentum, focusing the human race on our collective responsibility for global warming. And his chief tool was information: an "inconvenient" but totally science-based truth, reflecting the overwhelming consensus of those who study climate change for a living.

Clearly, no political agenda can succeed in the long run without a potent information agenda -- or, at least, people who are adept at using all available channels to build consensus and spur action. Honestly, when IBM started to use the term "Information Agenda" in their go-to-market messaging, I wasn't sure if I agreed with what they were doing. I understood the notion of, say, a "business optimization," "agility," or "green" agenda, because those terms point (albeit vaguely) to desired results. But information is a tool for building and maintaining an agenda -- it's not an end in its own right.

But then I realized that's not entirely true. Information technology is a precious corporate resource, as are the business intelligence and performance management applications that flow through those channels. So, in that very important sense, an "Information Agenda" makes great sense. Every organization -- public or private sector -- must build and sustain a strong IT, BI, analytics, and performance management capability. Sometimes those assets are wielded for corporate transformation or optimization (by Al Gores of the corporate world). And sometimes -- usually -- they're in the hands of grassroots personnel, who are simply trying to keep their organizations humming smoothly and on an even keel (hopefully, the next U.S.president can keep this big bruised ship of ours from capsizing).

Of course, we all recognize that actionable intelligence is fundamental. Every organization's Information Agenda must revolve around the need to keep that intelligence trustworthy, current, and relevant. So that all decisions -- no matter how humdrum and mundane -- may be grounded solidly in unimpeachable truth.

No matter how inconvenient.

Presidential Campaign Sparks Parallels With Data Governance Challenges

By Rob Karel

For those of us here in the U.S., an extremely important Presidential election is coming in November. For months, Americans have been inundated with spin doctoring and politicking at its worst from both campaigns.  We all hear words like "conservative" and "liberal" used as insults, and rhetoric from both sides say how important it is to foster bipartisan collaboration - while doing everything in their power to alienate those from other political parties.

Putting aside my frustration at seeing nasty politics and posturing to appease the lowest common denominator take precedent over critical debate about issues that truly matter to Americans and our allies, I can't help but marvel at the similarities in politics at the national level to the organizational politics many of us experience on a daily basis within our own companies. More specifically, how the need to adopt data governance to ensure the usefulness and security of critical enterprise data is inhibited by internal politics and posturing.

A brick wall often exists between business and IT where the business must throw their requirements over the wall and 6 months later IT comes back with a technology solution that may or may not actually meet those requirements.  Sometimes the business plays the role of the "bleeding-heart liberal" requesting capabilities and insights that IT feels are unrealistic and undeliverable within a reasonable time and budget. 

In these scenarios, IT is often viewed as  the "inflexible conservative" that sees new requirements as an insult to the existing systems that they have shed blood, sweat, and tears to deliver and this pride of ownership of the current state makes requests for new technology by the business a  threat.   But these roles are often reversed.  At times, IT is the liberal looking to implement cutting edge or next generation technologies (e.g., SOA, MDM) to allow them to better support and scale ever-changing business requirements, but because the conservative business does not have visibility into the precarious state of their IT infrastructure they don't want to finance these improvements because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

When discussing data quality and trustworthiness, the finger-pointing so common in national politics is also standard practice in large enterprises.  The business will often blame IT for data quality issues that they see in their enterprise apps and analytical environments, because the business assumes that if IT is building the pipes, they should also be responsible for the information flowing through those pipes. 

In this case, IT (rightly so, mind you) expresses frustration that only the business should define and measure data quality since the business owns the processes and decisions that are enabled with this data.  This lack of business sponsorship and support is cited as one of the major inhibitors to successful implementation and adoption of ERP, CRM, business intelligence, master data management, and other data-centric IT investments. 

The presidential candidates spin rhetoric such as "bipartisan cooperation is critical" out of one side of their mouths while their campaigns spend more time finding new, creative ways to embarrass their opponents than addresses critical issues.  This same passive aggressive/blatantly aggressive behavior plays out within our corporations too where senior executives say "our data is a critical corporate asset that must be protected" but provides no resources, prioritization, or sponsorship to actually change behaviors and processes that are putting this data at risk in the first place.

While there is little I can do to change the behaviors of our sometimes flawed political process here in the U.S., there are a number of recommendations I can provide to changing the tone of your campaign to improve the quality and usefulness of critical enterprise data.  These include:

• Identifying top-down executive sponsorship early to ensure cross-functional business and IT participation is mandatory, not voluntary.
• Limiting initial scope of your data governance program to addressing only the data that supports the business processes most critical to your company, and to those business stakeholders most willing and able to articulate how poor data quality is impacting those processes.
• Staffing business and IT stewards with business analysts that can effectively translate business requirements into technology solutions.  These individuals are the bridge that must ensure business and IT collaboration.  See The New Business Analyst for more on the business analyst role.
• Developing a compelling business case that can quantitatively measure the benefits of investing in data quality and governance. See A Truism For Trusted Data: Think Big, Start Small for best practices in developing a bottom-up valuation approach as well as Building The Business Case For Master Data Management for help in aligning your trusted data initiative with your company's strategic priorities.

In the meantime, I'll look forward to seeing everyone at the polls on November 4th! 

Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!

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William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent To Support ODF And Join Standards Boards

By Sheri McLeish

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it's not surprising. Microsoft has been moving towards more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it's also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT's efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

But before we get too warm and fuzzy about this change of heart, remember: It's only an announcement of intent. The relationships with the OASIS Technical Committee and the ISO/IEC are not official and confirmed. The success of this strategy will only be realized if there are no hard feelings, and Microsoft doesn't try to bully into the committees' efforts. I suspect that Microsoft will be welcomed aboard, however. Certainly because the resources will be welcomed, but also because these organizations would be hard-pressed to deny Microsoft a seat at the table without looking divisive themselves.

There are three major components to today's announcement:

1. 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 will add support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Support for these standards will be enhanced by the inclusion of ODF 1.0 and 1.1 under the Open Specification Promise.

2. Microsoft has previously expressed its commitment to supporting the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members (IS 29500). In the next version of Office, codenamed O14, Microsoft will update the support it provides for IS29500, the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members.

3. To ensure its products support the ongoing evolution of Open XML and ODF, Microsoft said it will take an active role in the development of both Open XML and ODF formats and in the SC34 working group designed to improve interoperability between the two. Microsoft said it also intends to join the OASIS Technical Committee for ODF that is currently developing ODF 1.2.

The impact of these initiatives will take years to be realized, and it remains to be seen if Microsoft can play nice and not try to overextend its influence. If it works, however, the open source XML party will be in full swing.