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?

Google Chrome Browser Gets Street Cred From Sony

by Sheri McLeish

Today’s news that Sony’s Vaio-brand computers are coming installed with the Google Web browser Chrome for users in the U.S. and Europe provides immediate legitimacy. The computers will also have Microsoft’s IE8 installed, but it makes Sony the first PC maker to sell computers with Chrome pre-installed. This opens the door for Google to rapidly boost consumer market share for its browser and signals that:

• Chrome is really ready for prime time. For Sony to agree to offer Chrome to its new Vaio buyers means that it’s passed muster to meet Sony’s user requirements. Chrome’s been touted for its speed and characteristic Google simplicity, but recent news reports show IE8 outperforming Chrome from a security perspective. In Chrome 2.0, Google added protections against cross-site request forgery and clickjacking that must offer enough improvement to assure Sony that it doesn’t pose a risk its buyers.
• Market share for Microsoft will continue to erode. For years Microsoft’s benefited from having IE pre-installed on new hardware. But as the result of anti-Microsoft backlash, court rulings in Europe, and increasing use of the web, adoption of alternative browsers has been creeping up. Firefox nets nearly 20% of the enterprise browser market and estimates of its adoption by consumers are more than double that. IE has never been more vulnerable, and Google can get a quick boost in market share with this move. Sony doesn’t disclose sales figures, but reports say it expects to sell 6.2 million PCs globally in the next year.
• Consumers will lead but enterprise likely won’t follow soon. While this move gives Google more street credibility with consumers, Forrester doesn’t believe that it signals an exodus from IE as the “official” browser for enterprises. Most organizations are standardized on some version of IE and continue to employ it because of the ease of centralized control and administration. Many are still locked into IE6 because of custom developed apps or third-party apps that only work with that browser version. Until Google invests in providing IT administrators with tools for managing or migrating apps (or perhaps inks a deal with OEMs that offer Chrome on business machines), IE will continue to dominate the enterprise landscape.

For Google, getting Chrome onto more consumers’ computers provides a foundation for its search engine as the default, along with the host of other services it offers, such as Google Docs. In speaking with information workers, consumers, and IT managers, Forrester hears again and again that the decision to go with Google or Microsoft is usually made once, and then the choice for everything else falls out of that decision. With the availability of Chrome alongside IE8 on Sony’s Vaio-brand computers, as well as Windows 7 being shipped in Europe minus IE8, the choice for many consumers becomes much more prominent and rapid.

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.

Free And Freer: Lotus Symphony Could Be Your Unsung Hero, But Only If You Hear About It

By Sheri McLeish

Everyone knows that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Or is it? With its free productivity tools suite Symphony, IBM/Lotus is looking to shake things up a bit, putting even greater pressure on Microsoft's Office margin and besting Google and Zoho as the lowest-cost alternative.
 
So far, enterprise customers have been reluctant to move away from Office due to concerns about supporting a new or multiple environments, document formats, user acceptance, and proof of savings after change management costs are figured in. But with the lure of free or much lower-cost alternatives available, CIOs are reexamining these investments in a suddenly interesting market given the economic climate. With its Open Office-based Symphony, Lotus provides a robust tool set that is enterprise-ready. To make the point, 40,000 of IBM's information workers recently made the jump off Office onto Symphony 1.2, and all of the conference materials for last week's Lotusphere09 event were produced using the tools. It all worked and looked great. But these workers were already on Notes, and what works for IBM doesn't necessarily work for the masses.
 
Lotus' biggest challenge now may be its image and marketing. Other than the loyal Lotus aficionados who turned out en force at the brand's premier customer event in Orlando -- the roughly 4,000 in attendance was up 2% from last year -- most IT folks are not up to speed with Lotus' latest offerings to ease internal and external collaboration like lotuslive.com, which was announced last week. Symphony fits into IBM ECM and the Lotus collaboration strategy nicely by providing the classic tools for creating, sharing, and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations along with some nifty innovations. But if you're not an IBM Notes shop -- and according to Forrester data, the overwhelming majority of enterprises are on Exchange -- you might not know about it.
 
The other tack, which has found traction for Google, is to work on the consumer market. IBM has never courted the consumer market well, or necessarily even tried. But when you have a product as good as Symphony is today, gaining mindshare in the consumer market creates awareness from the bottom up. Google Docs is a popular choice for many students not just because it's free, but because it meets their needs and has a great affinity with Google Mail and Calendar. When clients ask us about alternatives to Office, Google is the first one they mention. But in many cases, Google's limited functionality isn't viable enterprise wide. Until IBM puts some money into marketing Symphony -- to consumers as well as enterprises, it will struggle to break into non-Lotus shops. And that's too bad, because for those really looking to reduce Microsoft licensing costs without trading off functionality, Symphony sounds pretty good.

Enterprise Mashups Need Complexity To Create Value

By Gil Yehuda
Those who drink the Web 2.0 Kool-aid live in a idealistic world where we can mentally connect a great idea to a great implementation of that idea. We live on faith that the great implementation will come, since there are plenty of smart people out there who will eventually figure out how to make value out of technology building blocks. Sometimes our faith is tested when the killer-app does not show up for a long time. But evidence can restore our faith.

When I first saw mashups, I thought they were pretty cool. The canonical examples of this technology were all about the placement of data points onto a map. With mashups you can visualize where Fortune 100’s top companies to work for are located, and you can find a mailbox nearby. It’s certainly nice to use once in a while, and maybe worth bookmarking. But will this alone transform a business? Likely not.

Sharing location information via an online travels social network, like Brightkite, FireEagle, Bluenity, Dopplr, or TripIt, is also pretty cool. Using the integration hooks into Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, I can begin to share location information with those I trust. I can post where I am located now, and where I plan to be in the near future. I believe there could be value in this activity, but it’s not yet transforming the way I use information into business results.

But I am now beginning to see how these services combine to build a useful application. The “aha” moment for me was when I stopped looking for one mashup, or one sharing app, and saw how companies can combine multiple streams to create value out of data. What if you take a map mashup, a calendar mashup, a travel micro-share feed, an events feed, and dataset from a CRM system containing the names of locations of my customers? I trust that smart people can take these and create value. Why? Am I drinking the Kool-aid? No – I see signals that indicate this is happening.

Look at the new LinkedIn application widgets that mash-in LinkedIn data. My TripIt tool reminds me of a future trip to London, and tells me that I have a few LinkedIn contacts there. Based on information in my LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn tells me about relevant upcoming events. I found an interesting event in London. Will my contact attend that event? What if they’ll be traveling to Boston when I’m in London. Doh! So close.

But I see the outline of a new pattern. Whereas each data mashup is interesting, the right combination can transform my work behavior. There’s a who, what, when, and where, that all have to intersect onto a map and onto a calendar.

I recently met Sanjay Vakil of LuckyCal, who understands this pattern well. He is connecting the dots to create transformative value out of data streams. His product has some growing up to do before it is ready for enterprise rollout. But his product today combines a mapping mashup (telling me which of my contacts are where I am going to be), with a calendar mashup (matching when contacts of mine will be near me), and with an events stream (telling me what other events are taking place there at that time). Hey, that's the pattern: a set of data streams intersecting to create valuable information out of available information – but onto multiple mashup surfaces.

Suddenly the neurons start to fire. We need more than a single stream of data pins on a map to get our attention. As the LuckyCal product matures, it can become the paradigm for an enterprise mashup - triangulation. If it adds the data streams that matter most to me, (e.g. my CRM data), along with other streams and network information, it results in new information. The triangulation of these data sets means that I could predict whom I meet and what to do when I plan my trips. Moreover, my manager would be able see where the team’s travelers are now, and where they will be in the near future. My sales manager could see which of us will be traveling nearby other clients, and she may want take advantage of the proximity opportunities. Travel still happens, but we can get more value out of each trip. Enterprises like to hear that.

So, if you combine two mashups and couple of data feeds, you can create transformative value from readily available information. I had faith this could be created, but now that I see signals that others are implementing solutions like this. I have renewed faith in the relevance of mashups to enterprise computing. It's just more complex than splashing a data set onto a map. That's OK, enterprises are used to leveraging complexity to create value. And mashups can be the building blocks to enable their success.

Better Latte Than Never: Microsoft Office Web Apps Percolating

By Sheri McLeish

When Microsoft announced this week that its next version of Office will include web apps there was no real surprise. But it reminded me of Steven Wright on Dr. Katz when he acknowledged that he usually had four or five cups of coffee before his first cup of coffee. Knowledge workers have started drinking at the web apps cafe, but are just getting warmed up for the real thing. It’s when Microsoft’s brew is ready that it starts to count.

Microsoft has been sloth like to move its apps to the web, but it is coming at it from a position of strength. Zoho has a great buzz and feels like it adds an app a week while for Google it’s an all or nothing bid focused on alternatives to desktop productivity from Office. Microsoft’s taking on wikis and other collaborative needs, blending the experience in the tools. Want collaborative authoring? They have it (by the way, so will Adobe soon). Want a web-based editor? Got it. Want the web-based editor to work with your peers that have the full desktop while you collaborate on a contract or meeting notes? Got it. But bringing it all together without being overly complex or undercutting Microsoft’s Office suite margins takes time.

Microsoft is trying to evolve to keep its dominance in desktop productivity and maintain relevance. Today Microsoft continues to reign supreme in the desktop productivity tools space. The question is whether or not knowledge workers will be satisfied by lighter weight versions of their desktop tools, as Microsoft will be offering only scaled back web versions of its Office programs. Forrester’s data shows the uptake of web productivity apps in the enterprise to be miniscule even if interest is expressed. That’s because no one’s really satisfied with lighter weight versions. If they were a viable alternative to Office, we’d have seen much greater adoption of Google and others. And for enterprises believing they will be able to reduce licensing costs with web-based Office apps, they will likely be disappointed as availability will be through existing volume licensing agreements. Deployment costs should go down, however, and these are material.

So far, time seems to be on Microsoft’s side. Because even though web-based productivity tools exist, no one has done much more yet than mimic Microsoft’s capabilities. And no one has successfully figured out an efficient content collaboration strategy that engages knowledge workers the way they want to work – at the office, on the go, on the web, offline, authenticated or not, or some combination of these depending on a person’s role, location, personal preferences – or what day of the week it is. Choice will reign supreme as the knowledge worker demographic shifts and expectations increase on being able to transition seamlessly between devices and desktops, between wikis and Word. Microsoft recognizes this shift and can leverage its familiar apps to address this gap. But it’s still hurry up and wait for now.

Tactile user-built micro-analytics...OLAP and BI for the next generation...and for the aging Baby Boomer generation

By James Kobielus

This week at Microsoft’s annual BI conference in Seattle, they shared a lot of near futures from their business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) roadmaps.

In his latest post, Boris Evelson nicely described Microsoft’s splashiest near-futures demo, for 'Project Gemini." This set of features, due for 2010 availability under SQL Server "Project Kilimanjaro," will support (brace yourselves, this gets mildly run-on) self-service, interactive, ad-hoc, in-memory, column-oriented, Excel-integrated, Sharepoint-integrated, SQL Server Analysis Services-integrated, collaborative, desktop-based modeling, creation, sharing, publishing, and governance of multidimensional analytic applications among non-technical users within the enterprise.

Whew! As you can imagine, Microsoft is still groping for a pithy way to characterize the emerging new post-OLAP paradigm that their "Project Gemini" will enable. Fortunately, their "Project Gemini" demo is a lot more user-friendly than that description would lead you to believe. It hangs together smoothly, both from a usability standpoint and as a powerful approach for making dimensional modeling pervasive among Information Workers. At the very least, it was an impressive and entertaining presentation, delivered in the context of a storyboard-style value proposition from the conference's main stage.

The practical vision that Microsoft demonstrated corroborates Boris and my discussion of next-generation OLAP approaches in a forthcoming co-authored document. Though other BI vendors provide or are developing similar post-OLAP approaches on many levels, Microsoft has brought it all together into a powerful new synthesis that takes dimensional modeling away from the “rocket scientist” data modelers and puts it into the hands of any Excel power user. In the process, Microsoft’s approach has the potential to radically unclog IT departments’ OLAP development backlogs by providing users with do-it-yourself tooling integrated tightly into their BI deployments.

But, as I said, "Project Gemini" is still a near-futures work-in-progress, and, of course, depends on a full Microsoft BI stack. But seeing the demo several times--plus other futures that Microsoft demonstrated at this show, and then reading my other Forrester colleagues' most recent blog posts--triggered some other thoughts regarding next-generation analytics environments. Indulge me for a moment (this is all in addition to Boris' excellent sketch on next-generation BI).

Next generation? Shifting gears and speaking of human generations for a moment, I enjoyed Connie Moore's discussion of user-interface peripherals ergonomics for the many Baby Boomers (self included) who are moving inexorably into AARP territory. Coincidentally, Microsoft at the BI conference demonstrated their new "Surface" technology, which can best be described as a touchscreen physical table with an immersive spatially oriented navigation paradigm (and running Windows Vista under the "surface"). On Surface, Microsoft demonstrated a Virtual Earth application that delivered fresh BI metrics tied to points on a 3-D onscreen map (projected on a 2-D physical display) of downtown Seattle.

What occurred to me while manipulating the large visual onscreen objects on Surface was that this tactile interface is suited to those of us who have always have been ham-handed, and/or those of us who’ll lose fine motor control and visual acuity as we age. No, it probably will never become the standard UI technology for pervasive BI, but these "very large screen, very large input touch surface" devices may become the only usable BI clients for many of us as we age. At some point, the microscopic UI of mobile devices--such as the iPhone apps that Ted Schadler discusses--may become unreadable and unusable for senior citizens attempting to access BI applications.

Micro-interfaces? Speaking of micro-everything, Gil Yehuda’s discussion of microblogging reminded me of an important point about "Project Gemini." Fundamentally, that Microsoft technology supports what one might call user-centric "micro-modeling" within Excel of fine-grained analytics applications (which Microsoft referred to alternately as "assets" and "artifacts"). One such analytic micro-app might simply define a report-style view of of a particular range of rows and columns in an Excel spreadsheet model. Another might create a reusable dashboard component that, after having been published to Sharepoint’s shared library, be repurposed by other users in their "Gemini" applications. In this way, micro-analytics might be composed by users into larger models (call them "cubes" if you wish). As a persistent module of corporate institutional memory, a "Gemini" micro-app posting (to Sharepoint/SQL Server Analysis Services) is akin to a micro-blog posting to Twitter. Just as you link from your blog to other people’s micro- and/or macro-posts, you’ll do the same with respect to their "Gemini" micro- and macro-models.

What do you think? Is Microsoft atomizing the OLAP cube to smithereens? Are the days of traditional MOLAP and ROLAP approaches, with their high priesthoods of expert data modelers and cube builders, truly numbered? And when will Microsoft roll out a tactile, Wii-style, immersive post-OLAP environment for bouncing analytics objects back and forth, game-style, along an n-dimensional topological hypercube surface?

OK, OK, I’m not waiting for the latter. I can’t even visualize it, not even with my thickest eyeglasses. I assume that a Ph.D. mathematician can, or maybe Stephen Hawking.

But it is fun to dream.

Why the big fuss over microblogs?

By Gil Yehuda

I microblog.

Why? The truth is, I learn by doing and by speaking with others who do. So I dabble with Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Spoink, Rakawa, Tumblr, Utterli, Yammer, FriendFeed, 12seconds, and probably a few others that I signed up for and forgot to use. I have found a nice collection of people that I like to follow, and some people follow me too. So microblogging appeals to the extrovert in me, and I'm strangely fascinated reading what other people are doing (or what they say they are doing). Narcissism and voyeurism are at play.

The current pattern of Web 2.0 innovation starts with the incubation and socialization of a concept in the consumer space. For many vendors, this is just baiting the hook. Once these behaviors are socialized, maybe the most devoted users will want to take those behaviors to work too. And then someone with budget to burn might be willing to pay to support the habit. All the devotees have to do is convince the person with the purse that there is a real business need to satisfy. Addiction and justification are at play.

Microblogging now appears on stage. Smart people spend many coffee-infused hours thinking of reasons that real employees might need to microblog. Some of the use cases may even make sense. If people (and automated systems, sensors, and applications) are willing to emit bits of insight, these info-bit streams eventually compile into some form of valuable information. The idea of short message communication is chic and appealing. But microblogging requires patience on the part of the reader to learn the patterns emitted from the stream. Elegance and tediousness are at play.

But why the appeal? Why the fuss? I believe two factors are at play:

1. Mobility makes us omnipresent, but short on time. Microblogging appeals to those who use mobile devices. It provides a channel that honors our thumbs and encourages us to say just a few words. And we can connect to the intranet from anywhere. For some, this is true power.
2. The list of people I “follow” may be interesting to you. Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information. In the case of the microblog: my “follow –list” may be more interesting to you than my micro-posts.

As enterprises become more mobile, when we break out of the cube farms and conduct our primary work from our mobile devices, then we’ll see more miniaturization of communications. I expect enterprise microblogging to serve as a place where mobile workers check in. Maybe a few conversations take off, but then employees will revert to email the moment the conversation becomes something not sharable with everyone. And we’ll need some good filtering tools to help us organize and manage microblog streams. Right now, there’s just too much out there to be useful to the already-overworked information worker. We barely handle the volume of corporate emails now. So microblogs will have to provide evidence they are an improvement, or they will not thrive in the enterprise.

The more interesting behavior emerges when network-graphing tools surf through the people whom you follow and identify the influential people they follow. This is where human context makes information more valuable. Social connection farming is a bit creepy, especially in the enterprise. But if it catches on, then we’ll see a wave of new tools that harvest “follow-lists.” So if you think I’m interesting to follow, then you might be more interested in the people I follow. Maybe you follow me because you found someone else who does. All this will be followed by tools that protect the "follow lists" from prying eyes too.  So these little blogs are creating a big fuss.

Will the I&KM professional see microblogs as narcissistic, voyeuristic, and addictive toys that have no place at work? Or will mobile workforces find real use for a technology that keeps messages short and visible? What do you think?