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.

Let's Get Social

By Connie Moore

I recently read an article about how journalists are having to change, and change fast.  The gist of the article (sorry but I can't remember where I read it) is that the good old days of writing on deadline and having 24 hours or 12 hours to get your story done are dead and gone. Or as Kathleen Parker recently wrote in The Washington Post "Let me be the first in the new year to declare that the mainstream media are dead" (January 2, 2009).  She added "The mainstream media aren't really dead, of course. The industry has merely transmogrified, splintered into a billion little reflections of its former self. One-fifth of the world's nearly 7 billion people are now Web-capable -- all reporting, opining, interacting, twittering, digging and blogging."

I stopped for a moment while reading this and thought it through, because in many ways they are talking about me. Heck, I'm a journalist.  It's actually more complicated than that.  As my husband says, he just hates it when someone at a cocktail party casually asks, "Jim, what does your wife do?"  At that point he either launches into a long description of what he thinks I do (he's actually not completely sure) or, increasingly, he just says "she's a Vice President at Forrester Research," gives a little smile, and leaves it up to the listener to figure that one out.  But, if I decompose my job, I spend some of my day managing, some of it writing (a la journalism), some of it consulting and some of it talking with clients.  What that means to me is that my a good portion of my job--the journalist part-- is going social, whether I like it or not.  The good news is that I DO like it, although it requires getting used to a very different work style and having to carve out considerably more time to focus on blogging, and reading and commenting on other blogs.

CNN has definitely gotten the message that journalism has fundamentally changed.  I sometimes watch that network, not because I'm interested in the news per se (although I usually am), but because I'm watching how they have transformed from talking heads to moderators and orchestrators of a national conversation.  I first noticed it on Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room.  Wolf doesn't seem particularly social, but Jack Cafferty is on the program and every day Jack asks some provocative question. For example, today's question is: "is the world economy in a depression?" Listeners can go to Jack's blog and posts comments.  Jack then reads some of the more provocative posts on air, and the conversation then goes back to the blog posts. It becomes a circular process. It's fascinating how CNN journalists have turned into on air, real time moderators.  Sometimes Jack gets 300, 500, 700 or more blog posts within a day.  He got over 900 responses to the question: "How tired are you of Blagojevich, Coleman, Franken, and Palin?"  (I wonder how many he would get if he asked:  "How many of you care what Dick Cheney thinks?")

The most fascinating of the CNN journalists from a social perspective is Rick Sanchez, who is on in the afternoons.  Rick has 50,000 people on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, and he interacts with some of them during the broadcast.  If you watch his show, and you also see the iReports that CNN viewers send in, you realize that CNN (at least during Rich Sanchez's show) is facilitating a two-way broadcast discussion instead of merely reporting the news.  Instead of the broadcaster beaming his or her message into your living room, the broadcaster is stirring the virtual pots of thousands of people who are participating in the live event.  What a groundswell change.

The shift to social interaction in print and TV journalism is just the tip of the iceberg.  In businesses, people want to interact with the vendors they buy from.  I'll give you an example.  My local pharmacy cut back its hours.  A year ago they stopped opening on Sundays.  I thought that was an inconvenience.  Then, last summer, they went to "summer hours" in which they closed on Saturdays at 1:00 PM and closed in the evenings at 6:00 PM.  This supposedly was to give their employees more time to enjoy the summer and the regular hours would start back after Labor Day.  Never happened.  I'm now left with prescriptions that I can't pick up because I forgot to go down there before 6:00 in the evening, or prescriptions that are still waiting for me under the counter because I forgot they weren't open on Saturday afternoon and got there at 2:00 instead of 12:30 PM.  I am so irritated at this pharmacy that I've switched all my business to CVS, which has hours that actually fit into a working person's life. And I made sure my old pharmacy knew that I had stopped being their customer, although it felt like my complaint about their new hours went in the manager's one ear and out the other.  I would dearly love to post a blog on that Pharmacy's non-existent site or see what other customers think. 

That's just one example of how a social site would be helpful to a business.  This pharmacy could monitor what customers think before they one day belatedly wake up and realize that all the business went down the street to the other guys who are open later.

No matter what your profession--journalist or pharmacist or something else, it's time to get smart about getting social.

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!

• a
• b
• c
• d
• e
• f
• g
• h
• i
• j
• k
• l
• m
• n
• o
• p
• q
• r
• s
• t
• u
• v
• w
• x
• y
• z

B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
See all »

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 »

Back to top »

C

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
See all »

Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
See all »

Back to top »

E

Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
See all »

Back to top »

G

Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
See all »

Back to top »

H

Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
See all »

Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
See all »

Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
See all »

Back to top »

K

Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
See all »

Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
See all »

Back to top »

L

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
See all »

Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
See all »

Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
See all »

Back to top »

M

Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
See all »

Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
See all »

Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
See all »

Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
See all »

Back to top »

O

Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
See all »

Back to top »

P

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
See all »

Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
See all »

Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
See all »

Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
See all »

Back to top »

R

Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
See all »

Back to top »

S

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
See all »

Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
See all »

Back to top »

T

Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
See all »

Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
See all »

Back to top »

W

Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
See all »

R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
See all »

Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
See all »

Back to top »

Y

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
See all »

Back to top »

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.