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.

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?

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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B

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
See all »

Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
See all »

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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
See all »

Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
See all »

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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Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008 is coming up soon — September 23-24 in Orlando, Fla. This event is designed to arm technology and business leaders with emerging organizational, process, and technology practices that balance chaos and control to drive new business value. We have a great speaker lineup this year, with keynotes from:

Guest Speakers

• Boyd Beasley, Senior Director, Customer Support, Electronic Arts
• Sandy Carter, Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM
• Karla Gill, Vice President, Enterprise Workplace Solutions, Marriott International
• Oliver Goh, Business Development Executive, Implenia
• Bob Pearson, Vice President of Communities and Conversations, Dell
• Gene Rawls, Vice President, Continuous Improvement, Wells Fargo Financial
• Donald Toland, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Qwest Communications
• Kenneth Washington, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Privacy Leader, Lockheed Martin

Forrester Speakers

• Matthew Brown, Principal Analyst, Research Director
• Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst
• Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst
• George Lawrie, Principal Analyst
• Sharyn Leaver, Vice President, Research Director
• Connie Moore, Vice President, Research Director
• R "Ray" Wang, Vice President

Of course, the best way to fully benefit from the event is to attend; you can visit Forrester for all of the relevant information. If you're attending, here are some great ways to maximize your experience:

• Check this blog for our in-depth updates from keynotes and track sessions
• RSVP on our Facebook Event page, and network with attendees
• Follow us on Twitter as we plan and launch the event

If you can't be there, you can still stay connected with these platforms. But hopefully we'll see you in Orlando!

Podcasts From Forrester

By Claire Schooley

We're doing podcasts at Forrester now, and I'm the internal resource for how to get them done. Here's what we've learned so far:

Post new podcasts on a regular basis. Decide on a schedule — twice a week, every week, every two weeks and stick to it. Listeners look forward to new material on a consistent basis. Consistency helps you gain and maintain an audience.

Name your podcast. Consider a contest to identify a good name. At Forrester we are still working on a name. Any ideas? In the meantime, you can name the podcast after your company like we have — Forrester Podcasts.

Identify upbeat music. Start and end each podcast with three-to-five seconds of music. Use the same music each time to give your podcast an identity, like NPR's All Things Considered. Do you have in-house musicians who might enjoy creating your theme music?

Keep podcasts short. Six-to-twelve minute podcasts are ideal. If the topic takes longer, break it into two or more podcasts and let listeners know this podcast is the first of a two- or three-part series.

Plan a podcast format that fits the topic. Vary the format depending on the topic and the presenter but keep the music and podcast name consistent. Here are some formats we've tried:

• A hosted podcast — a host identifies the topic, introduces the presenter, sums up the presentation (only a couple of sentences), and closes the podcast with an invitation for listeners to respond in a blog.


• A hosted Q&A podcast — a host introduces the topic and engages the presenter in Q&A. with three or four planned questions. The host’s role is critical in keeping an easy, natural interaction.


• A host/presenter format — the presenter acts as both host and presenter and does a one-person show.

Provide opportunity for listener interaction. Podcast are Web 2.0 technology and listeners want to interact. These podcasts need to be connected to a blog so listeners can make a comment or ask a question. We at Forrester believe this is a great way to interact with our clients. We will continue to learn as we develop these podcasts and make them available on our Website. If you have feedback or ideas for podcasts, please send your thoughts along.

Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud

By James Kobielus

Sometimes ideas for blog posts flow out of everyday conversations with colleagues. I want to thank Leslie Owens and Matt Brown for stimulating the following thought train.

The external competitive environment is the cloud where opportunities and threats hang, sometimes latent, sometimes looming. So it only makes sense that enterprises will outsource more of the competitive surveillance to the cloud of external resources, such as analyst firms, third-party market intelligence subscription feeds, social networking, Web 2.0, etc.

Of course, enterprises realize they don't dare outsource the competitive intelligence function entirely. That explains why they maintain research staff, tools, portals, and informational resources in-house. Mostly, these competitive intelligence teams monitor the prevailing market conditions that impact on their companies' core businesses. But, to a great degree, they also serve as an early-warning system helping their organization respond to specific breaking events -- i.e., the "disrupters" -- that threaten to capsize the corporate boat.

Recognizing this perennial "disrupter pre-emption" requirement, enterprises are concerned with best practices for setting up event-driven competitive intelligence operations. These best practices should help them survey the external horizon more comprehensively and proactively. Best practices should also help them foster, harness, and harvest internal collaboration among competitive-intelligence subject matter experts.

Essentially, competitive intelligence operations of this sort practice CEP in the following senses that I described in a previous post:

• Each event may be quite complex in its own right, standing for a linked set of data updates, application state transitions, and process status changes (NEW NOTE: a "disrupter" is any extremely complex, perhaps way too vague, but still undeniably important "event" -- disrupters aren't "tagged" as such -- and they may not be easily identified before, during, or after the fact -- maybe, hey Leslie, on-the-fly social tagging is the best way to approach this squishiness).
• Each event-reliant decision agent (e.g., end user) may access, interact with, and/or consume events through a complex interface (dashboards, analytics, semantic layer, etc.), across multiple devices (desktop, laptop, Blackberry, etc.) and have a complex event-enriched streaming  "experience" (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence groups make use of the full range of portals, e-mail, IM, search engines, social networking, wikis, blogs, podcasts, workflow, alerts/notifications, etc.).
• Each event-reliant decision agent may be a complex creature in its own right with its own complex, convoluted, squishy decision-making methodology -- i.e., an individual human being with their own habits and cognitive/psychological dispositions; or a group making decisions collectively and collaboratively through workflow, or social networking; or a half-human/half-automated workflow behaving in the herky-jerky manner one would expect from a split-personality decision agent; or a completely automated orchestration of applications triggered by rules engines, etc.) (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence teams are very human teaming environments, at heart -- everybody is a "sentinel" on the "lookout" for critical events while others are "sleeping" or attending to something else).

Tying in another observation from that earlier post, I expect that CEP for I&KM (i.e., real-time, event-triggered, under-deadline, continuously-refreshing dashboard-sharing collaboration applications) will play a key role in event-driven competitive intelligence everywhere. CEP, hence BI, will be used to beef up organizations' in-house competitive intelligence/surveillance function, supplementing (hopefully not replacing) the outsourced competitive intelligence/surveillance they get from analyst firms such as Forrester.

In such an environment, the self-service, in-house research portal's the chief presentation layer, and BI operates as an intelligence source and/or target accessible via the portal, with real-time/near-real-time data integration approaches (e.g., ESP, CDC, MOM, trickle-feed ETL, etc.) providing the low-latency plumbing to deliver those feeds to the DW/BI/portal/preso front-end.

The BI vendors are laying the foundation for this emerging best practice. If you look at what vendors such as Business Objects are doing, they're making more external, commercial, competitive intelligence feeds accessible, via partnerships with content aggregators/publishers, from their platforms (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070521_006524). They're also providing text mining/analytics-integrated tools (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070924_006494) for searching across internal and external, unstructured/semi-structured data sources. And they're expanding the social networking and other collaborative features, and mashup offerings, for bringing together real-time feeds of internal/external data/events (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20080313_00001).

Business Objects is a bit ahead of the industry curve on all these things. But it's clear that, as market leader, they've laid down the chief challenge for all BI vendors, to make their offerings more pervasive in competitive intelligence use cases, and also to harvest the informational resources of the Web 2.0 cloud to the max.

BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond

By James Kobielus

Business intelligence (BI) remains one of the most vital and innovative sectors of the data management arena. The past year saw BI achieve a new degree of importance in the solution portfolios of users everywhere. In fact, BI has begun to play into a much broader range of enterprise IT planning and deployment decisions than ever before. What follows are the most important trends that will continue to transform the BI industry, and add a new degree of complexity into decisions confronting CIOs, enterprise architects, and information and knowledge management professionals:

• BI becoming SOA’s crown jewel: The past year has seen a rash of headline-grabbing M&A deals in the BI arena, with Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, SAP’s deal for Business Objects, and IBM’s pending takeover of Cognos—not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms. It’s far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same M&A-stoked empire-building that we’ve come to expect from large IT solution vendors. What’s driving this recent industry consolidation—which is sure to continue in 2008--is growing vendor recognition that BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution portfolio. Though Oracle and SAP (and, to a lesser degree, IBM) already had decent BI wares in their respective SOA portfolios, none of them were on any enterprise’s short list of name-brand BI solution providers—until, that is, each of them decided to grab a leading BI pure-play. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features.
• BI evolving into tailored business analytics: CPM—sometimes called “business analytics”—is rapidly becoming a key competitive front in the BI wars. Increasingly, BI/CPM vendors are offering tailored solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries. Vendors’ continued profitability also hinges on their ability to provide the professional services necessary to create, customize, and support business analytics for each vertical industry’s and specific customer’s unique requirements. Without a doubt, we’ll see further verticalization of product and service offerings by CPM vendors in 2008, which will provide a necessary hedge against the inevitable creep of commoditization into such horizontal analytics segments as financial, human resources, sales and marketing, and supply chain management.
• BI going truly real-time through complex event processing: Complex event processing (CEP) promises business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams. However, CEP has heretofore been conspicuously missing from the mainstream BI arena, necessitating stovepipe CEP implementations that are only loosely integrated with enterprises’ existing visualization, reporting, dashboarding, information modeling, metadata, and other BI infrastructure components. That will change big-time in 2008, as most leading BI vendors start to partner with CEP pure-plays, or acquire them outright, in order to strengthen their support for real-time event-driven applications. Indeed, we expect IBM to ramp up its CEP/BI integration now that it is acquiring both CEP pure-play AptSoft and BI/CPM vendor Cognos. AptSoft will also figure into IBM’s business process management (BPM) portfolio in support of closed-loop BI and business activity monitoring (BAM). We also expect to see SAP/Business Objects, Oracle/Hyperion, SAS Institute, Microsoft, Information Builders, and MicroStrategy venture into the CEP arena in the coming year. Likewise, it’s very likely that the newly independent Teradata, which has taken the lead in real-time data warehousing (DW), will snatch up a CEP vendor to build out its real-time BI portfolio.
• BI bundling with DW appliances: Appliances have even begun to take up permanent residence at the heart of the enterprise data center: in the DW and BI infrastructures. Increasingly, vendors are focusing on integrating, packaging, and pricing their DW/BI products as pre-configured, modular appliances for quick deployment. These appliances consist of processing, storage, and software components that have been prepackaged, preconfigured, and pre-optimized for core DW/BI functions such as multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) queries, bulk data loading, and online archiving. The past year saw a growing range of DW vendors—including such DBMS powerhouses as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft—reorient their DW/BI go-to-market strategies around the appliance model. In turn, leading BI vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos made a big push into the appliance arena. In 2008 and beyond, more and more DW vendors will pre-integrate BI solutions—their own and/or those of their partners—into their appliances. Increasingly, DW/BI appliances will be tailored, packaged, and priced for many market segments and deployment scenarios.
• BI goes collaborative: Collective intelligence is an organization’s most precious asset. Traditionally, the BI industry has offered little to directly address one of the most critical components of group IQ: the collaboration environment. Instead, most BI applications focus on delivering targeted reports, analytics, dashboards, multidimensional visualization, and other key data to individual end users in isolation, rather than to larger business teams. In the past year, though, the BI industry has begun to roll out more collaboration features in their products—such as Microsoft with their new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 solution--or, at the very least, to begin talking about new collaboration features to expect in the coming year. In 2008 and beyond, we expect to see the BI, collaboration, and knowledge management segments converge. Likewise, we expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs, wikis, and social networking revolutionize the BI experience. Many BI vendors now realize that decision support environments should allow users to access intelligence wherever it may reside, be it in data warehouses or in the heads of remote colleagues.

Going forward, Forrester will increasingly focus on the cross-synthesis of BI with all of these solution areas. We will provide best practices, methodologies, and tools to help customers sort through the myriad issues.

Notes From Oracle OpenWorld

by Connie Moore, Colin Teubner, Rob Karel, Ken Poore, Rob Koplowitz, Stephen Powers, Barry Murphy and Claire Schooley.

A few weeks ago, several Forrester analysts attended Oracle World. Now that we've gotten back and had a chance to think about what we've heard, we wanted to post this blog to share our thoughts with clients. Here are some observations on what we heard from Oracle about BPM and middleware, data integration and data quality, search and collaboration, enterprise content management and social computing, message archiving and retention management, and human capital management.

BPM and Middleware feedback from Colin Teubner:

What really struck me is how much Oracle was talking about middleware. Charles Phillips opened his keynote talking about it and Oracle's application integration architecture (AIA — if you don't know what that is, it's a whole separate discussion), and Larry spent a lot of time in his keynote talking about it too. In fact, middleware has been the fastest growing part of Oracle's business for at least two or three years, and they have several significant advantages over IBM's stack from my perspective.

Specifically, they are talking about having the only business process management suite that covers content-centric processes using the same engine as for integration-centric or people-centric processes. (This discussion wasn't at the executive level, but farther down in the BPM product management area.) They poked fun at "some vendors" who make you use different, acquired technology for different types of processes. I haven't seen specifics of how Oracle's BPEL product (Collaxa) works with Stellent though, but they definitely do NOT go for IBM's idea of a "portfolio" of software. It's a comprehensive stack, and if you don't want to use one piece of it, that's fine — just use the other pieces and they'll integrate with what you have. They don't sell anything that overlaps in functionality with anything else.

Data Integration and Quality feedback from Rob Karel:

My main takeaway from OracleWorld, specifically around Oracle's data integration strategies, is that its data quality software strategy is a mess.

Oracle already has some internal competition from an ETL perspective between its Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) product that the Database Group embeds within the 11g database and the Fusion Middleware groups' Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which was acquired last year from Sunopsis. While Oracle is doing some cross-development between the two solutions, for the most part these two teams operate independently with their own roadmaps and objectives — sometimes competing for mindshare.

The most recent demonstration of this was when I met separately with executives from the database group, the ODI team, and the master data management team and discussed what Oracle is doing about data quality. The ODI team just informed me of a DQ partnership with Trillium Software with the release of Oracle Data Quality for Oracle Data Integrator (ODQODI).  ODQODI is a joint development partnership that packages both Oracle's ODI data integration and Trillium's DQ products into a single license, single install. ODIODQ includes Trillium's batch data profiling, parsing, and matching functionality, although customers who are looking for real time data quality or postal address verification would need to engage Trillium directly to enable those capabilities and services. This is a strange partnership because I expect ODI to be Oracle's "real-time" integration solution, while the partnership only supports batch (not real-time) data quality.

The database team, on the other hand, continues to focus on data as an embedded part of OWB functionality and doesn't seem to care what ODI is doing.  In the meantime, the MDM team is focusing its integration efforts with ODI, but I don't see this Trillium/ODQODI partnership as all that valuable for their MDM product since they should prefer to have real-time/transactional data quality capabilities to complement their MDM offerings.

Oracle has other data quality solutions spread throughout its portfolio including Siebel Data Quality Matching Server used within its Siebel apps environment, recently acquired Hyperion System 9 Financial Data Quality management that came along with its purchase of BI vendor Hyperion, and matching and parsing functionality embedded within its Universal Customer Master, Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub MDM offerings. To enhance data quality within its MDM offerings, Oracle also partners with Silver Creek Systems for product data quality and Trillium for customer data quality. 

I believe Oracle will need to reconcile its internal product development and partnering strategies to eliminate the confusion created by so many data quality offerings spread across its portfolio. 

Search and Collaboration feedback from Ken Poore:

I focused on search while at Oracle World. I had several one-on-ones, a few which included my colleague, Matt Brown. We had a session with a partner that had positive things to say about the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) product and team, most notably that the team was very helpful and took many of their suggestions and rolled it back into the product — a good sign for a still relatively young product. In my experience, that sort of 'listening' only lasts for the first two or three releases of a product. We also had a session with a customer, but it was more portal-centric and turned out to be marginally useful.

I had an extended couple of sessions with Vishu Krishnamurthy (Director of Development for most of their collaboration tools) and several of the product managers. It was a very positive two-way exchange. They shared many of their latest developments, and I shared some my thoughts on their direction as well as some ideas that I have been developing to help push the market along. I felt — and they concurred — that SES is just emerging as a true contender against similar products from IBM and Microsoft. They are still fleshing out a lot of me-too capability, but they are really bolstering their connectivity capabilities and entity extraction, two key areas in the enterprise search market these days that could leap-frog or least enable them to catch up quickly. Oracle has some really solid ideas, especially around distributing components of search indexing to the owners of the applications being searched (CRM, ERP, etc.) instead of leaving it in the hands of the 'search team'. Doing so enhances the buy-in from every department involved and leverages the application owner's expertise and context.

So while I would say there were no earthshaking announcements, I felt like they have a very strong product management, technical, and marketing strategy that will only gain momentum from this point forward. It is a very competitive market, and like IBM, they will struggle trying to be successful against the pure-plays for customers that do not have a significant incumbent investment in Oracle products (or in IBM products, in IBM's case).

Enterprise Content Management and Social Computing feedback from Rob Koplowitz:

I heard a bit about the ECM direction from Rich Buchheim. He states that at least one Stellent product will be retooled to run directly on Content DB. That's an interesting development from a scalability perspective. I suspect that will be a major engineering effort and won't be fully implemented in the next release.

The other thing that was interesting is that WebCenter Suite is being positioned as the standard front-end for Fusion apps. As a matter of fact, one of the defining elements of a "Fusion" app is that it will have a WebCenter front-end. The convergence of WebCenter and Content DB is pretty cool. Essentially, any app using WebCenter will have native access to content stored in Content DB. Essentially, it means that Oracle apps will be able to seamlessly surface content in context in any application. The cool part will be that content generated on one app can be surfaced anywhere. For example, if a document is stored as part of sales process in a SFA app it can be called natively from inside of a support CRM app if they want to see what the customer was promised. Since it's a Web service call from a database with rich metadata the content becomes extremely portable.

The other thing Oracle talked about a lot was Social Computing. There was a big emphasis on blogs, wikis, social networking, tagging and RSS in WebCenter, which again means it can be natively leveraged in Fusion apps.

Enterprise Content Management feedback from Stephen Powers:

I spoke with some members of the ECM team, and they were talking up integrations between Oracle’s Universal Content Management, and Siebel. But Siebel will act as the base application, not UCM. So, if Siebel customers are looking for ECM, Oracle wants to offer them an SOA-based ECM option that sits on top of Siebel, rather than trying to sell them a separate UCM package. They're also making noise around product catalog management, and real-time predictive analytics. They hedged a bit on functionality roadmap, though.

For Digital Asset Management (DAM), Oracle plans to go upmarket, with integrations with Adobe InDesign. And it will be able to have greater video management capabilities, such as management of multi-part files, indexing of closed captioning, management and indexing of call center audio files.

I also spoke with someone from Sealed Media, the DRM vendor that was acquired by Stellent a few months before Oracle bought them. Oracle has rebranded Sealed Media as Information Rights Manager. But I got the sense that they are not very well integrated with the rest of the company; while we spoke about Sealed Media functionality, I didn't get the sense that they're working very closely with other members of the UCM team.

Human Capital Management feedback from Claire Schooley:

HCM people in recruiting and learning talked about the social computing aspects of learning that are coming soon (whatever that means) and that will be a part of Fusion in the future. Here's an overview of the scenario:

An organization that wants to hire an intern who might turn into an employee after graduation would contact colleges and get student recommendations from professors. An email would then be sent to the students suggesting that they go to a link on company's Website and read about the job. If student is still interested, he/she registers and then can interact about the job with those in charge. If still interested, the student completes a proposal on how he/she would approach and carry-out the task along with information about themselves and a picture if they want. These proposals are read and reviewed by staff and online discussion occurs (Web and video) with the final two or three candidates. Once chosen, the successful candidate is put into a partitioned group of temporary employees and completes all the HR forms and information well before they start work. They also are part of a community of practice (CoP) that they can access to get more familiar with organization, project documents, etc. and meet and interact with people on the team they will work on. When they start work, students know and have interacted with the people they will be working with, will have taken care of all HR transactional material — and are ready to work. (The key is that all these technologies are linked seamlessly).

Reinvention Requires A Near-Death Experience

by Erica Driver.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology, was speaking from experience this morning during his interview by Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg at the BIF-3 collaborative innovation summit. By a near-death experience, Wladawsky-Berger was referring to what IBM went through when Bill Gates founded Microsoft and the PC took off. Another example interviewer Mossberg raised during the conversation was Apple, which was in terrible financial straits in the mid 90s and has risen from the ashes to become today’s darling in the consumer electronics and digital music markets. Wladawsky-Berger said that near-death experiences open up the mind to new experiences – they “clean the brain.” These experiences force people to think in new ways and look for new opportunities. For IBM, the Internet became the lifeboat and the company clutched onto it. Later came Linux and other technologies.

I would contend that IBM went through this again more recently, in the Lotus group. Lotus may have had a near-death experience somewhere around 2004, when Microsoft’s market share in messaging and collaboration began to increase, some Lotus Notes/Domino customers began to jump ship, and Lotus revenue growth was at a low. The lifeboat for IBM’s Lotus group is enterprise Web 2.0. This new wave of technology is IBM’s opportunity to change the game, to innovate and deliver solutions to customers that allow organizations to transform the way people innovate, collaborate, and -- in general -- work.

One of the most important technologies in this mix is the 3D Internet. While many are skeptical (as Mossberg put it this morning, referring to Second Life, “What does fake people using fake money, flying on magic carpets and building little islands have to do with business?”), my view is that the 3D Internet will have as big an impact on business and work as the 2D Internet (the World Wide Web) did. Maybe even bigger. Irving Wladawsky-Berger seems to be of like mind -- here is some of what he had to share today:

• The 3D Internet is the evolution of social networking and collaboration technologies. In Wladawsky-Berger’s view, the killer apps for 3D Internet are meetings and learning and training. At IBM, they have started building sites – both in Second Life and on other virtual world platforms -- for virtual classrooms and conferences. Dozens or even hundreds of people can come together in a virtual classroom or meeting room through their avatars.
• Virtual worlds are a big improvement over conference calls. IBMers who were participating in meetings in Second Life found the experience of dealing with each other there more "human" than dealing with them in conference calls. Conference calls are "cold" – a group of people dials in at 9AM and talks for 30 minutes for a specific reason. Much of the chit chat that occurs before and after in-person meetings is lost, and with it camaraderie and the potential for serendipitous interactions. In Second Life, people do chit chat at the beginning and end of meetings. They get to know each other. Bonds of relationship form.
• The virtual and physical worlds will merge into hybrid worlds. The MIT Media Lab is one institution doing work in this area. The lab is doing research into physical-world sensors that control items in a virtual world. For example, a person wearing sensors on their hands may be able to move their avatar’s hands by moving their physical hands. MIT Media Lab is working on the Huggable, a robot that’s being designed to have a full-body sensitive skin with over 1,500 sensors, quiet back-drivable actuators (whatever those are), video cameras in the eyes, microphones in the ears, an inertial measurement unit (whatever that is), a speaker, and an embedded PC with standard wireless networking. The physical-world Huggable is tied into the virtual world. When the child moves the Huggable, the robot’s avatar in a virtual world moves.
• Watch what’s happening around you. “If you are smart in a company like IBM, which is full of sharp people, you watch what they do,” Wladawsky-Berger says. “When you see them doing certain things you realize you have to change directions. In 2006 we had more and more people at IBM who started to have more and more meetings  in Second Life. These weren't kids, they were people with jobs, dealing with each other.” Guaranteed, you’ve got people working in your organization who use virtual world technology to play games. Some may be using it as part of their social lives. Increasingly, they will look for ways to use it for work.

Social Computing As Disposable Technology

by Rob Koplowitz.

The question of measuring ROI of social computing is hot because it's so much a part of enterprise software acquisition. As information and knowledge management professionals move to get ahead of this emerging technology curve, they find a very consistent pattern:

• People are using this stuff! Blogs and wikis in particular are popping up everywhere. Why not? They are easy to access, often free, and they are dead simple to use. It's one of those permission / forgiveness things. We've all done it.
• If people are using these things that IT doesn't know about, there is no way of ensuring security, privacy, availability, governance, compliance, risk mitigation and all of those good things that keep the organization running and employees out of trouble (maybe even jail!).
• Most really don't want to shut it down because in many instances these are more efficient solutions than those provided by the organization. These tools are often just easier and better for generating and publishing content.
• The natural inclination in this situation would be to bring in the tradtional software vendors and see if they can support these new technology directions. Not surprisingly, a number of big vendors are ready and willing to help, including BEA, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
• Sounds great. Lots of reasons to go with one of the big vendors (see bullet 2).
• How much will it cost? How much will it give back? In other words, can the acquisition be justified with a strong return on investment analysis?

OK, here comes the rub. It is very difficult to measure the ROI of more efficient communication and collaboration. Think about how email or IM came into your organization. Chances are it was being used by individuals and departments in a largely unsanctioned manner and IT was asked to reign in the chaos and establish a real enterprise strategy. No big ROI analysis because the technology had already proven itself. It did not need ROI assesment so much as sanctioning.

Now, we don't want to go down the same path with social computing, but there are lessons to be learned and opportunities that are new in evaluating this technology. The question does not need to be, if I invest a million dollars, will I get back a more than a million dollars in value? In the case of social computing that could mean measuring an awful lot very small actions across an awful lot of users. It might cost more than a million dollars to do the analysis! Instead, the process of a big bang ROI-led implementation can be turned on its head.

What allows the acquisition process to be dramatically different is the emergence of enterprise savvy vendors offering these new technologies in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The process of evaluation now becomes very different. It starts with a series of questions:

• Is it secure?
• Is it reliable?
• Will it be available to our users?
• Does it integrate with our other technology, like directory, authentication, etc.?
• Can I ensure that my users will adhere to basic use policies?
• Can I get my data out of the system if I decide to go in a different direction?

All of these can be true of a service based offering. If you evaluate a vendor and the answers to these questions are yes, then you can feel confident rolling out the solution. Now, here's the good part. You aren't justifying a million dollar investment, you are justifying a per month per user investment that might look more like $25 per user. If you pilot it across an initial set of 50 users to address a very specific business requirement for six months, your total investment is $7,500. If it's not working out, pull the plug or change vendors. Hence, the concept of disposable technology. However, if it is working out, you can replicate the success in a controlled manner across more users and more business processes.

Now, none of this means that a thorough evaluation of traditional vendors should not be part of your strategy. It absolutley should, and to that end, look for my upcoming research on the offerings from the big infrastructure players. However, the new breed of pure play vendors are well worth consideration. In fact, using their technology could provide the best technology proving ground you could ever have, particularly in an area where ROI is going to be dificult to prove. Will they be part of your long-term strategy? Could well be and at the very least they may help you keep the traditional vendors on their toes, which is always a good thing.

An Experiment In A Community-Driven Research Agenda

by Rob Koplowitz.

This September 25-26 at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Carlsbad California, Matt Brown and I will be presenting a session on Social Computing coming to the enterprise. As we began the process of creating an agenda for the session we were immediately struck by the thought that this session should not be driven by the two of us (as charming and articulate as we may be) but by the community that is interested in the topic. In other words, you all should be setting the agenda for a session on social computing, not us. If social computing has the ability to change how work is done, let's put it to work. We always want feedback after a session, but here's a chance to get way ahead of the game and tell us what want before the event.

To that end, we have set up a Wiki to allow the community to drive the process. Matt and I will build the session agenda directly from the input into the Wiki, so if you have areas you'd like to see highlighted, stories to share, words of caution or encouragement please let us know. Willing to help? Access the Wiki here and let's get started!

We'll provide updates on how it's going (both the good and the bad) right here.

Do Enterprise Users Need A Second Life?

by Rob Koplowitz

A while back I was invited to a very interesting presentation of some research going on in Sun Microsystems' labs. They were showing off a project called MPK 20. The name of the project is aligned with the naming of the buildings on their Menlo Park campus, MPK 1 - 19. MPK 20, the next building, will be completely virtual. Think of MPK 20 as a private, behind the firewall, version of Linden's Second Life. The idea is for Sun to provide a very rich area for remote workers to come together and collaborate. Their early vision is very much a virtual version of their physical workspace world. The question that occurred to me is, do we need to pursue this path of virtual workspaces?

Let's start with an assumption. The paradigm of bringing workers to a physical office is beginning to break down and it's only going to get worse. A few driving factors:

• Carbon footprint. Organizations will be increasingly held accountable for the overall effect they have on the world. Asking workers to drive or fly to a physical location in order to do work that can be done virtually is undoubtedly the biggest contributing factor to overall carbon footprint for most organizations.
• Competition for workers. If you require workers to come to an office every day, your hiring is constrained by the talent pool that is located within commute distance of your office. Would you rather have the best worker available in the world or the best worker within 30 miles of your office? Additionally, workers that commute from long distances are far more likely to become frustrated and leave.
• Plane travel just sucks! Between delays, the physical discomfort of being shoved into a tiny chair and massive time inefficiency, an alternative to the constant flying that accompanies the life of today's workers is becoming an imperative. Just this week I conducted an all-day meeting via phone and web conference with a client on the opposite coast. You know what? It worked fine. The client saved a ton of money and I got at least 20 hours of my life back by skipping two cross country flights.

I'm sure I'm just hitting the tip of the iceberg here. The point is that tools that allow us to work remotely more effectively are extremely  important and becoming more so. We have a host of tools today including email, IM, Web conferencing and collaborative workspaces that  help with the process. The promise of things like MPK 20 and Second Life  is to bring all of these together  into a single environment that allows interpersonal interactions around a given task, process or area of interest. The "human" element is introduced in the sense that I can share thoughts and ideas with others through the use of our respective avatars in a very natural way.

So far, firms that have experimented with doing business in a virtual world have had varying levels of success. The killer use case to date has been around virtual conferences with presentations as a main focus. IBM, Cisco, Intel and others are conducting customer meeting and conferences in Second Life successfully. The nature of the interaction favors a virtual experience because it creates a context for bringing together a community through an area of common interest. The users and vendors benefit because the attendees can interact far more effectively than in a standard Web conferencing setting. The fact that you can turn to the avatar next to you and converse, or join an interesting conversation is powerful.

It's not clear whether users will gain similar benefits from interacting in this way in more ad-hoc settings. The idea of a globally dispersed group of individuals serendipitously coming together in a  virtual conference and solving the "big problem" is intriguing. The question is whether people are interested in working this way. The issue of training and change management will loom large. Hey, I have an idea. It's your choice: meet me in the virtual conference room in 5 minutes or squeeze into a middle seat in the back row of a 737 for five hours and then meet. Now there's some experiential learning. I'm willing to give Second Life a second look!

Google Gears And Converse All-Stars

by Rob Koplowitz.

One of the great joys I have in working for Forrester is the opportunity to collaborate with my colleague Oliver Young on the future of Web 2.0. Oliver and I bring very different perspectives to the table and the final product is better as a result. Part of the reason for our difference in perspective is generational. I am a baby boomer (born between 1946 and 1964). Oliver is what Forrester calls a millennial (born between 1980 and 2000). Oddly enough we share a passion for Converse All-Stars. Mine was the result of seeing them worn by the late great Wilt Chamberlain. Oliver, no doubt, was influenced by some highly pierced and tattooed musician.   

One area where we do not agree is on the impact of Google's recent announcement of Google Gears, a set of JavaScript capabilities that Google has developed and released to Open Source that allow disconnected access to web based content and application logic. The first instantiation is available today and allows users take Google Reader off-line. If you read my recent blog about Google and Salesforce.com targeting Microsoft, you can quickly see how critical this functionality is in competing with a vendor that can leverage an install base of about a half a billion copies of client based productivity software.

In my humble opinion, the initial capabilities of Google Gears are interesting and certainly useful, but are a long country mile from being able to provide a user experience that will lead to a change in the way people work on a day to day basis. Now, if you could off-line a true productivity application like Google Spreadsheets, then you'd really have something valuable. The problem is that the effort of off-lining a multi-user, multi-editor application like Google Spreadsheets is infinitely more complex than an application like Google Reader. The basic issue is that multiple off-line users of the same document is a recipe for edit conflict disaster. There are certainly instances of this being addressed in a somewhat elegant manner. Lotus Notes has a fabulous off-lining, replication model that extends to complex collaborative applications. The problem is that the brains behind Notes replication, Ray and Jack Ozzie, now work for Microsoft. And, they are focused on the Live initiatives, which are directly aimed at Google!

Oliver believes that the combination of all those great big brains at Google, the broader Google development ecosystem and the wide world of an open source community will solve this problem. I say, maybe, but not anytime soon. So, here's the bet: Oliver says that Google will release an off-line version of Google Spreadsheets by October 1st 2007. No way says the wily old veteran. At stake? One pair of brand new Converse All-Stars.

BTW, there is a lot more at stake here than a pair of Converse All-Stars. This could be one of the keys to Google  getting to that next  big pile of money.

Is Microsoft Serious About Social Computing?

by Rob Koplowitz.

I’ve already blogged here about how much I enjoy using Office 2007. Today I wanted to blog about wikis and blogs. I opened up Word 2007 since I generally like to create things locally and then push them up to the network when I’m ready.  I opened Word and clicked on “New” and found two choices; “Blank document” and “New blog post”. Well, that’s kind of cool. Microsoft has already integrated Word and blogging. Might even be able to use Office Live for that...

This brings me to a question that I’ve been hearing a lot from clients lately: Is Microsoft serious about wikis, blogs and other emerging aspects of social computing? The answer is a resounding YES. Wikis and blog are tools for creating content and collaborating. These are markets that Microsoft takes very seriously.

If you haven’t had a chance to familiarize yourself with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 yet, take a look at the social computing functionality. SharePoint now has the ability to generate wikis and blogs as template types. While SharePoint’s implementation may not be as elegant and full featured as some of the new pure-plays, it is completely and seamlessly integrated into their flagship collaboration product. (Apologies to the folks in Exchange, but let’s face it, you’re email, SharePoint is collaboration) What does this mean? Well here are just a few examples:

Every blog and wiki can be real-time enabled with presence, IM etc. if you are running Office Communication Server

Wiki and blog templates can be augmented through the addition of web parts

Templates can be customized and extended through the use of SharePoint development tools

Content generated in blog and wiki templates can be managed using policy management tools that are part of SharePoint

While pure-play vendors will be more nimble and faster to deliver new functionality, Microsoft will do what they do best; integrate with the rest of their technology stack and continue to invest. 

STAY TUNED: Research on the topic of social computing in the enterprise is in progress.

Billy Joe Armstrong, Social Computing and Converse All-Stars

by Rob Koplowitz.

Not long ago I was spending a sunny Saturday afternoon watching my son play soccer. Among the group of soccer parents gathered on the sidelines that day was Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day rooting for his son who was playing for the opposing team. Billy Joe was wearing Levi jeans, a t-shirt and black Converse All-Stars. Since I was dressed the same, I asked my daughter Sarah if I was hip like Billy Joe. She explained that just because my 30 year old fashion sense had come back into style it did not make me hip. She also pointed out that use of the word “hip” was very un-hip.  Well, I used to be hip.

This brings me to the exciting new phenomenon of social computing in the enterprise, which like Billy Joe is undeniably cool. However, like Levis and Converse All-Stars, we’ve seen this before. The roots of the internet are in helping geographically and organizationally dispersed teams come together to network, solve problems, generate ideas, etc.  When ARPANET (the precursor to today’s internet) was a mere four node network connecting computers at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute the initial benefit was that these organizations could use the network to work together on building and expanding the network.

Even the “social” part of social computing is nothing new. Let’s face it, long before wikis and blogs were used to satiate our unquenchable thirst for all things Britney Spears, The Well served the same need for The Grateful Dead.

Now the last thing that I want to do here is trivialize the current transformation of today’s internet from a tool for institutional communication and commerce to a forum for group interaction and the individual’s voice. After all, this is a blog posting! In fact, I spend a large portion of each day trying to figure out the effects that this new breed of social computing will have on enterprise computing. This brings me to a few questions:

                Is your organization using social computing tools for business purposes?