Gartner Amplifies Views on Info Access 2012

April 13, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Search, Sponsored Post, advanced search, enterprise software

At just-concluded Gartner Symposium in Las Vegas, Whit Andrews, raconteur and Gartner’s increasingly influential lead analyst on search (aka Information Access) offered a forward look on the market that stated: “Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by 2012.” (See Chris Kanaracus’ write-up of Whit’s talk in PC World’s PCW Business Center.)

What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.

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FAST

Recommendation & Search: New FAST White Paper

February 14, 2008 at 5:13 pm · Filed under Search, Sponsored Post

FAST recently released a white paper on the business and technology of recommendations that, yes, we are recommending to FASTforward Blog readers.

Focusing on the business challenges facing managers of media and entertainment websites, the paper, Enhancing Content Discovery Through Recommendations Solutions, includes insights on how innovators can:

• Grow content and advertising revenues by exposing new or unknown content. Current search structures guide users to content within a particular topic area or category. By building associations across categories, recommendations expose users to what they may have otherwise bypassed
• Encourage browsing by teasing users with additional content choices, and spotlight popular content to drive wider distribution
• Obtain customer intelligence on which content items are most valued. Feedback loops analyze what content is preferred and not preferred in near real time by blending active feedback and customer behavior statistics
• Connect users with communities and experts who share their interests. The social context provides a rich source of insight on connecting people both with content and other people who share their interests or questions.

Register here to download this free paper from FAST today — and let us know who you would like to recommend it to!

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J.P. Rangaswami Brings CIO Perspective to FASTforward08

February 10, 2008 at 3:19 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08, Sponsored Post

Most readers will know J.P. Rangaswami, Managing Director in BT Group and ex-Dresdner Kleinwort Global CIO from his popular Confused of Calcutta blog and his appearances at technology management conferences. He has achieved industry luminary status through his thoughtful and often outspoken views of the role of IT in driving change and the challenges of executing that role inside the large enterprise.

Recently he commented:

“…when I see emergent tools with the following characteristics, I get very interested:

• Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
• Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
• Evidence of take-up by Generation M
• Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service
• The *possibility* that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally.”

These are the dynamics JP is seeing in the Facebook phenomenon, in Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other web watering holes where user-generated content is the wellspring of value. He has noted that the enterprise is starting to benefit as well, citing examples like fire departments (Los Angeles FD) using Twitter and “old line” manufacturers like Slater Tools and aerospace manufacturing specialist Winslow Automatics taking advantage of YouTube.

Many IT departments are plagued by “polarizing” debates – with social media tools bleeding into the enterprise from the bottom up, with the “consumerization” of technology, and with the emergence of customer-centricity, personalization, and new interaction paradigms between the business and its audiences. In his FASTforward 08 keynote, JP will review the inevitability as well as the benefits of IT departments embracing the User Revolution and accepting the fact that the user has gained control.

Don’t miss the chance to meet J.P. Rangaswami and hear his latest take on where the user revolution is taking us. Make time Wednesday morning 2/20, and don’t miss registering for FASTforward 08. There is still time to catch this unique event.

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FAST

John Hagel Brings Sustainable Edge to FASTforward08

February 6, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under FASTforward08, Facebook, Sponsored Post, User Revolution

“Community and commerce need not be at odds. Community in fact provides a unique context in which commerce can take place as customers equip themselves with better information. The result is a “reverse market” in which power accrues to the customer.” – John Hagel

John Hagel will be setting the stage as lead-off speaker on the first full day of the upcoming FASTforward 2008 conference in Orlando, Tuesday Feb. 19, 2008. (It’s not too late to register here.)

You may be thinking that the quote I’ve highlighted above makes a fitting piece of commentary about trends in the markets we are operating in today, but would it surprise you to learn that John wrote those words when he was a lead principal in McKinsey & Company’s Interactive Media Practice in 1997? At the time, his book Net Gain, which investigated the dynamics and consequences of expanding markets through virtual communities was outrageously visionary as well as being a Business Week best seller.

By 1999, John was publishing another best seller, Net Worth, in which he pursued in more depth the turn toward customer-centered markets and proposed the emergence of a class of business he termed the infomediary. John forecast that as power in markets shifts to consumers and communities, a new role will emerge for trusted third parties to capture and aggregate consumer information online and then act in behalf of those consumers to get the best terms for various products and services. Things haven’t quite worked out that way yet, although some would argue that Google has built its hegemony on exactly this dynamic, channeling search-based information about user intention to advertisers, and MySpace and Facebook have begun to succeed in bundling virtual community with commercial business models to the benefit of their members.

With his long engagement in the dynamics of the “user revolution,” we’re looking forward to what John has to say about the state of the transition today and what we should look out for going forward. In his most recent book, The Only Sustainable Edge, John and co-author John Seely Brown talk about the importance to strategy of working at the many “edges” of the business and working with speed and agility.

At FASTforward08, John will be speaking on: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization. He proposes that it is clear to all by now that as market power shifts to the user, it becomes increasingly critical to be able to measure the potential impact of this trend on the future of the business and its role in the industry. Unfortunately, the value of many of the intangibles that power the User Revolution – skills, information, social capital, etc. – cannot be captured and measured with traditional metrics such as ROI (Return on Investment). John, currently heading up a new Silicon Valley Research Center for Deloitte, will introduce us to a new set of leading indicators that can be used to measure and predict the impact of the User Revolution on your company.

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Reminder: tomorrow’s webinar with Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee

January 10, 2008 at 10:23 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post, Webinars

A quick reminder about tomorrow’s discussion between Tom Davenport of Babson College and Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School from 11:00-12:00 AM EST tomorrow. (Moderating the discussion: Jim McGee, a contributor to this blog.)

The topic again: their ongoing disagreement over the viability and speed of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools within the enterprise.

Find out more here and be sure to register.

Also, if you have questions you’d like to see put to Tom and Andrew, please post them in the comments.

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David Weinberger Keynotes FASTforward08

January 6, 2008 at 7:45 pm · Filed under Conferences, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08, Interviews, Sponsored Post, User Revolution

This post is the fourth in a series in which we will be introducing keynote speakers who will be contributing to the conversation at the upcoming FASTForward 2008 conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Fl, February 18-20, 2008. Check here for more detail and registration info.

“A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.” - David Weinberger

For those who attended FASTforward 2007, David will be familiar from an exceptional series of video interviews he conducted with keynoters like Chris Anderson, Tim O’Reilly, and Bill Inmon, practitioners like David Watson of Disney/ABC and Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones, industry analysts like Forrester’s Matt Brown and IDC’s Sue Feldman, and, of course blogging gurus like Euan Semple and Jim McGee.

But of course Weinberger has long been a highly respected industry commentator in his own right. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, writes a popular blog, and is often heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the US and seen presenting keynotes at Internet-related conferences.

Many are not aware that he was once a Vice President of an Internet search engine firm, and that background helps shed light on some of the core insights to be found in his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David’s third book (following Cluetrain Manifesto, 2002, and Small Things Loosely Joined, 2003), he once again takes up the challenge of interpreting the changes that the Internet is bringing to our personal lives, to our social lives, and to the core assumptions that have anchored many businesses. Six years on from the publication of Cluetrain Manifesto, this is the clearest account yet of the fundamentals behind the “webiness” of the web, and how what’s different about information on the Internet is turning many operating assumptions about knowledge and about business on their heads.

At FASTforward 2008, David will be sharing his views on the 2.0 transformation and some specific ways in which 2.0 user behaviors spawn new business opportunities in places you’d probably not expect. Don’t miss the chance to catch a deep and deeply funny mind at work.

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Andrew McAfee Returns for FASTforward 08

December 13, 2007 at 9:01 am · Filed under Conferences, EIU Report, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post, User Revolution, Web 2.0

This post is the second in a series in which we will be introducing keynote speakers who will be contributing to the conversation at the upcoming FASTForward 2008 conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Fl, February 18-20, 2008. Check here for more detail and registration info.

For those who attended FASTforward 2007 in San Diego and for most readers here, Andy McAfee needs no introduction. He has simply become the leading business academic generating thought leadership around the concepts and practices of Enterprise 2.0 (E20 here).

Of course coining the phrase itself earned him some credit, but his Spring, 2006 Sloan Management Review article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration did more than introduce a new buzz term. In the piece, he clearly laid out a set of business considerations that continue to inform the developing thinking that we see here at the fastforward blog and elsewhere.

Andy’s SLATES model (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals), for example, remains a source of core insight into the nexus of technology and interaction patterns that trigger when any thoughtful E20 practice gets under way. (For some recent extension suggestions from Hinchliffe check here.)
This past February at FASTforward in San Diego, Andy’s keynote session, in addition to articulating his take on the meaning and the progress of the E20 phenomenon, offered commentary on the special 2.0 research project that FAST and the Economist Intelligence Unit released at FASTforward: Serious Business: Web 2.0 Goes Corporate. And the breakout sessions he engaged in offered plenty of food for thought not just for the participants, but for all the readers of Andy’s widely-quoted blog, through his subsequent 3 posts on considerations from the conference.

For example, Andy blogged about the counterpoint between his definition of Enterprise 2.0 and Tim O’Reilly’s phase 2 definition of Web 2.0, and the exchange they had at the event that highlighted each other’s thinking.

O’Reilly:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

McAfee:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Give Andy credit for immediately turning to the hard questions. As he asked in the blog:
“Tim is entirely correct about the importance of network effects and collective intelligence within Web 2.0, and therefore also within Enterprise 2.0. Every Web and Enterprise 2.0 application I can think of gets better as more people use it. So is my definition above at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate?”

Andy gets on with his business this way:
“…my definition instead emphasizes another ‘rule for success:’ the use of technology platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don’t specify up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain patterns and structure that can be exploited by their members). I continue to see these as the key points of differentiation between E20 technologies and previous corporate collaboration and communication tools.”

At FASTforward 2008, Andy kicks off the conference with a keynote at 5:15 pm Monday afternoon. Much has happened in the last year to move E20 to a whole new level. Andy will be helping set the stage for what happens next. Be sure to be there. Guaranteed to be worth the trip. And bring your thinking cap.

To find out more and receive a $300 blogger discount, click here.

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FAST

The Donut and Terror

October 5, 2007 at 1:41 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Charles Handy, Conflict, David Kilkullen, Donut, Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post, Terror

I have been writing about how the “Donut” will replace the traditional organization.

Here is Kilkullen on how the “Donut” works in the Terror context:

I find it fascinating when I find that someone I don’t know has seen the same as I.

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The link between Personalization and Social Networking

August 20, 2007 at 3:56 pm · Filed under Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

In a great article regarding the future of merchandising, Joe Lichtman gives a view of the future of eCommerce. At the end of the rainbow, we’ll get microsites for everyone. Sounds familiar? It should: it’s the Amazon model. Lichtman explains that the reason the site is so compelling is because every single experience is built on top of understanding you. The social aspect of all of this includes features such as Listmania, you might also like, and people like you also bought. It is an essential part of the buying process and has become more-and-more expected on-line. So if you’re a retailer out there, can you afford not to offer personalized merchandising? Lichtman says no and introduces the terms searchandising and personalized merchandising to show how search makes it all happen:

Can You Be Like Amazon?

Two fifths of U.S. consumers now expect retailers to offer them personalized promotions, according to research from Gartner. Yet only 16 percent of retailers are using personalized recommendations tools, according to Forrester. Now is the time to get personal before your competition does.

Like Amazon, you should be focused on building a personalized online shopping experience that is based on personalized search, navigation and recommendations. What’s important, though, is that you look at personalized merchandising as a cohesive strategy. The personalization piece parts — your search engine, navigation engine and recommendations engine — must work together as one. Only then can you ensure true personalization and have a single point of management.

While a dynamic, personalized storefront will automate some aspects of the online merchandising process, the role of the online merchandiser will become even more critical. There will always be a need to overlay the right set of business rules to align personalization with the key needs of the retailer. The benefit of the personalized storefront is that it allows you to merchandise for future conditions instead of reacting to past trends and data.

The concept of a personalization and recommendation engine is critical not just to retailers but also to Enterprises whose knwoledge workers benefit from being able to serendipitously discover what others like that they might also like, what others have found that they may also find useful, what others have created that they might also be able to monetize. Paula in her post and JP in his fifth of a series allude to this very thread that what we like is more important than what we see.

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SOA and SaaS convergence points to new market demand for ‘integration-as-a-service’

July 9, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, SaaS, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews, mashups, podcasts

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: Cape Clear Software.

Take SOA and SaaS to their natural maturation and adding more interoperability and integration into the online services mix becomes inevitable. When standardized services come from a variety of sources, then a variety of means to connect them makes more sense, too.

So when will we see the first signs of integration as a service?The answer, it turns out, is now.

As the use of Enterprise 2.0 mashups sweeps the IT industry, the concept of converging enterprise services has expanded to hosted munging of business applications and back-office functions.

Why not then extend SOA itself by embracing more integration services that help vendors, ISVs, and service providers bring more elements of business processes together, too?

The budding notion of “integration-as-a-service” allows enterprise business leaders to “shop around” for their services, regardless of hosting, and opens up the prospect for a thriving new ecology of services and integration models for mission-critical activities … not just for maps and widgets. The advancement to SOA for many companies may well be accelerated by more choices on means of on-demand connections, both inside and outside the organization’s own IT boundaries.

I recently conducted a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O’Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software, on the eye-opening prospects for integration as a service. Early adopters are already outsourcing aspects of integration.

The implications are staggering: Business operators and entrepreneurs create and amend complex processes and workflows through a simple point and click interface that prompts integration that’s executed on someone else’s infrastructure. Pay by the use or general subscription. Retain control over data and ID management.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

A couple of factors are driving this. First, it’s the whole technology maturity thing. Six or seven years ago, the standards around Web services were in their infancy, and people didn’t have a lot of experience with them. Because they were young, unproven, untested, and lacking in key bits of functionality, people didn’t really want to go there. Technology is one element of it, but there are a few more important elements driving it as well.

One is a secular trend toward simplicity and flexibility. At some levels, this has been driven by teams through virtualization. Storage and processing power are being very quickly virtualized. Applications are being virtualized, with software-as-a-service, on demand. There is a long-term shift by customers, who are saying, “We don’t want to own complex infrastructure anymore. We’ve been there, and done that. We want something else.”

We had an RFP come in – and this isn’t all that unusual – from someone looking to do a big SOA initiative. It was – and I’m not joking — a 111-page RFP.

Customers look at the choices available to them, and say, “Do we want to do all this big SOA integration on our own by buying these complex things, or are we prepared to look at alternatives? And, do those alternatives have any reality?” They do, and many companies are shying away from these big, complex initiatives.

You can sit in a room with a bunch of executives, both from the business and IT segments and, say, “Hosted integration is a good idea,” and they’ll know that. We’ve got some proof points around it. Most notably, one of our marquee customers in the software-as-a-service base is Workday. The PeopleSoft founders got together to rebuild an ERP application, but this time on a hosted basis. Read the rest of this entry »

 

 BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software [41:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (593)

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-Ever Increasing Expansion of SaaS into Multiple Applications
-Is There Anything SaaSy About SOA, or Are They Two Different Animals?
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WSO2 expands ESB market with Apache Synapse-based, open source SOA offering

June 15, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: WSO2

WSO2, Inc. has entered the open source SOA field with a slate of veterans from Web services specifications, application server design and lightweight framework development. The company’s latest offering to the market came June 11 with the arrival of WSO2 ESB 1.0, based on Apache Synapse and targeted at both developers who want to use enterprise service buses (ESBs) quickly, as well as operations architects seeking lightweight and high-performing components.

To help better understand and evaluate WSO2’s approach, I recently moderated a sponsored podcast with guests Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, and Paul Fremantle, co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2.

Here are some excerpts:

I’ve been impressed with the fact that SOA is creating early-on an environment, in which open-source products are, in a sense, defining feature sets and approaches. In the past, we saw commercial products establish niches and define infrastructure areas that then became areas that open-source products might pursue.

One of the things that makes SOA different from CRM, ERP, or even traditional enterprise-application integration is that SOA is architecture. It’s a style, an approach, or a methodology for building loosely coupled, composable services that meet the needs of the businesses. So it doesn’t really demand a particular technology stack. As a matter of fact, people can implement SOA using a very wide variety of technologies, which they probably already own.

One of the things you see again and again in the computer industry is that people get to a point where they layer technologies on top of each other, and then it just gets too heavyweight. The benefits of reusing that old stuff are outweighed by the disadvantages.

We were very involved in open standards and in writing and implementing the specifications, but many of those implementations were layered on top of the Java EE enterprise runtime. We found that there was a whole new middleware based on XML and self-describing messages based on simple HTTP communications that didn’t need the existing EJB/Servlet runtime — that didn’t need to have all those existing layers.

So our philosophy when founding the company was to look at stuff afresh, and to build things with the simplest, most-lightweight combination possible. We tried to target users’ requirements, rather than target an existing code base and legacy solution than we might have if we were working for a large company.

We need to cover not just the Java platform but also the C, Perl, and PHP — the full gamut of platforms. SOA is not just a Java story. It’s really a cross-platform, cross-technology standard approach.

What you used to see was that companies would put together a kind of magic package, which was intellectual property, plus support, plus training, plus everything. And somehow they’d value all of this at some astronomical figure. Read the rest of this entry »

 

 Learn more about the arrival of WSO2 ESB 1.0 [43:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (538)

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-IONA corrals open source SOA assets under FUSE brand, further aligns with Apache
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Has the long-expected wave of cyber crime/warfare finally appeared?

May 29, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, guest commentary, innovator interviews, podcasts

Reports in The Economist, New York Times, and PC World point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these events.

They may well be a bellwether of what to expect. These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations and large corporations.

As many of these articles allude to, the attacks problem will not get any better until the basic architecture and governance of the Internet technologies themselves are addressed. Band-Aids on 1,000 cuts only propels the ongoing Spy vs. Spy gamesmanship — only the stakes are fast escalating.

And so with that I dust off a sponsored conversation I had last year with Akamai Technologies co-founder and chief scientist, Professor Tom Leighton. In it he pretty much predicts — nearly a year ago — what we’re now seeing. His prescriptions are not easy, but they increasingly seem necessary. Read the transcript, or listen to the podcast.

Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B discussions on the Internet and society.

 

 Akamai's Leighton on cyber security [28:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1414)

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UPS visibility solutions help businesses drive customer service via managed supply chains

May 23, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under Social Computing, Sponsored Post, innovator interviews, podcasts

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS

Effective information-sharing across the distribution of goods — visibility into transportation supply chains and distribution networks — is a vital part of the information revolution and the knowledge economy.

Global and local players in the total distribution channel are constantly looking for reductions in cost, efficiency improvements, and slashed time to distribution — all of which can substantially reduce the total cost of an overall production and distribution activity, and heighten customer service and satisfaction.

UPS started with tracking on the Web in the early 1990s and today supports online tracking in 63 countries. UPS has extended basic services to cover broad supply chain visibility for shippers, receivers, importers, and exporters — both residential and commercial — through its traditional U.S. small package services, as well as via global UPS Freight, Air, and Ocean Freight Services.

I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that examines the market trends driving the need for greater supply chain technology and efficiency, as well as the visibility services UPS has in place. Joining me was Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program at MIT; Stephanie Callaway, director of customer technology marketing at UPS; Frank Deen is the shipping manager at Rackmount Solutions, and John Schaffer, president of TrueWave.

Here are some excerpts:

… Companies and leaders [are] concerned … about continuity — business continuity. We saw that destructions like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 caused a lot of companies to start recognizing that their supply chains are genuinely at risk.

A lot of vulnerabilities were always there, but weren’t very apparent or evident. So, there’s a fair amount of recognition about this vulnerability. Right now, there is some work going on in that some companies are planning to make their supply chains more resilient and trying to actively manage risks.

The companies are concerned with optimal supply chain design, and this takes in the aspect of outsourcing. How much outsourcing do we use? How much of that do we even think of putting offshore, trying to reduce cycle time, cost, and uncertainty in the system? That will ultimately enable them to be much more responsive to spikes and drops in demand.

Companies continue to squeeze their supply chain to lean it out, and make it more efficient and more effective. There are a lot of drivers in the industry right now that affect the price of sundry industries differently.

A lot of it comes down to having relationships with customers and suppliers. They would be open and free to share the information that ultimately will help both organizations to make better decisions, reduce uncertainty in the system, and take out some of the cost and uncertainty. That makes the system potentially much more efficient.

Some of these capabilities are becoming more readily available for large companies, and hopefully in the near term, to small- and medium-sized enterprises. The challenges aren’t simple, but I think there are some tools and processes emerging that are going to make this much more possible in the future, and therefore get us a little closer to that Nirvana of the synchronized supply chain.

Initially, when we started doing this, because we were shipping from so many locations, even though it was being shipped on our account, we would have to contact each one of those shipping points, each warehouse, each manufacturer to get tracking numbers to send to our customers. Of course, now we are able to have that information sent directly to the customer when the product ships. They get an email with that information.

Plus, on UPS Quantum View, we are able to pull up a report every day that shows everything that has been shipped out on our account, whether from our local warehouse or any of those other locations. We’re able to have that tracking number and see the exact progress of that package — when it was picked up, where it’s at currently, when it’s expected to be delivered, and the address that it’s expected to be delivered to. When a customer calls and asks a question about it, we are able to go to that and immediately give them an answer that provides a comfort level that we are keeping track of their merchandise that they are waiting to get.

We could get to the markets, but we couldn’t do in a way that allowed our customers to have visibility into the process. There’s a lot of uncertainty when you are shipping internationally. When you have visibility into the process from point A to point B, it really changes the dynamic quite a bit. One of the tools that Stephanie was discussing, Quantum View Manage, allows us to see if there are problems along the way. Then we can communicate with our customers in such a way that we can set the proper expectations.

Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS

Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.

 

 UPS provides greater supply chain technology and efficiency [37:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1327)

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Bursty Saves the Day!

May 11, 2007 at 9:39 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post

Echoing Tom Mandel’s recent post and with a nod as well to Anne Zelenka, I want to try to give a concrete example of how a traditional enterprise workflow (closing a deal) can be augmented with Enterprise 2.0 technologies, breaking down organizational boundaries and letting users uncover associations and gain new insights.

We go back to the world of Enormabus and meet Bursty:

Bursty employee finds a way to adapt outside tools into his work-life to give himself an edge, in the process reinventing how he works and leverages information.

Bursty works for Thogwheel and is trying to close a big deal at Enormabus. Bursty is browsing Facebook and finds out about Eargot, a potential influencer at Enormabus through a fellow MIT grad. Bursty then uses a social networking search service to identify two possible links or shared tags between himself and Eargot. He investigates one by email; no response. He investigates the other by IMing a friend who says he’s lost touch but offers a cryptic clue: Geneva. He searches for Geneva across all of Thogwheel’s CRM repositories and finds that Eargot (misspelled) is based in Geneva even though his office location is Toulouse. Inside his company, he uses employee search to find fellow employees in Geneva who might be able to secure a meeting with Eargot.

On another front, Bursty discovers through a search of his channel partner’s wikis that one of the critical decision criteria for the deal is making the Enormabuses fly longer with less maintenance.

Meanwhile, Bursty gets a personalized alert from his search portal telling him about a materials study that may help alleviate one of the deal’s sticky points. He posts the doc to the group wiki and flies to Geneva on his way to Toulouse. At the critical meeting with Eargot, he has the author of the materials report on the phone, his local contact whom Eargot plays tennis with, and a just-in-time proposal that shows the link between Thogwheel’s product and the life expectancy of Enormabus. Eargot walks away convinced, adds Bursty to his network, and writes an influential report to the decision-makers advocating Thogwheel.

While some dealmakers are already using these tools and infrastructure, many others are not. At the end of the day, the winning proposal will be what matters in driving behaviour at Thogwheel and beyond.

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Open source projects increasingly empower SOA infrastructure definition and development

May 4, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews, podcasts

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Unlike earlier open source initiatives, which often trailed commercial development of crucial software infrastructure, today’s many community-based services oriented architecture (SOA) projects are early-on defining the means through which SOA can be realized.

Development of commercial and open source versions of essential SOA components are happening concurrently. Open source SOA projects are providing a unique opportunity for developers to get their hands dirty and learn a little bit about the field, as well as contribute back some of their ideas in a form that is very healthy for new technologies.

Many commercial vendors are creating large software infrastructure stacks that are designed to target their customers with things that they have supported in the past. But a lot of new technologies and methods are also popping up, from rich Internet applications using AJAX applications, to new ways of using master data services — all of which present a new set of challenges, and a new set of connectivity options — that community development is great at solving.

To explore why this is true and how open source will shape the future of SOA infrastructure, join Dan Kulp, principal engineer and community lead at IONA Technologies, and Debbie Moynihan, IONA’s director of open source programs, for a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, hosted by me. IONA Technologies is taking an active role in several open source SOA initiatives, including the Apache incubation CXF enterprise service bus (ESB) framework project.

Here are some excerpts:

One of the goals of an open-source community is to bring new developers in. And a lot of times those new developers have different priorities or different ideas of what an ESB should do. They can provide a lot of expertise and new and fresh ideas that can make the open-source project a bit different than closed source, and provide some unique features.

One of the most fascinating things about the open-source community is something may not be my number-one requirement. But if it’s one of the other developer’s number-one requirements, they’re more than welcome to work on it and get it done. So in my mind it would have slipped. But in his mind it would have gotten done. It’s a fascinating environment.

For example, originally, when we were doing a lot of the Celtix stuff, we were still ObjectWeb, and Spring wasn’t really one of our priorities. From IONA’s standpoint, it’s not something that we’ve really experienced much with our customers. But as part of the merge with XFire, that user base was a little different than the Celtix user base.

Priorities got shifted, and we started developing more flexible models for deployment that allow the use of Spring, if you’re a Spring person. If you’re not a Spring developer, we have other options that are available to deploy your applications in a very different format that provides a lot of flexibility when you get that broad community throwing ideas out there.

There are definitely a lot of features being added that target a variety of users and use cases that really work into our original definition of what CXF was going to be. If you take a look at that Apache incubation project page, there’s a list of stuff. It was the original design of what this project was going to be. It’s going to have multiple bindings and multiple transports. We do have that, and that’s good. But with our growing list of cool features that developers keep coming up with, we’ve been adding all these multi-deployment capabilities. We’ve been adding a lot of these new WS specs like WS-Addressing and WS-Reliable Messaging.
Some of them weren’t even really anywhere close to final specs when we started the Apache CXF project. It’s a never-ending battle of more ideas coming at us, which is great — there are no complaints about that. But there’s definitely a lot of work to be done and a lot of new ideas. So, it’s a growing project with a growing list of features.

One of the other neat things about Apache is how many top-level projects they have. It’s in the 30s now, and a lot of the top-level projects have subprojects. So, there’s a lot of various functionality and different projects. One of the things that we’re trying to do from Apache’s success standpoint is reach out to some of those other communities, get involved with them, and help them get involved with CXF. Hopefully, we can work together to figure out the gaps that we have. Maybe we can use some of their technology, and they can use some of the CXF stuff.

The CXF runtime provides a lot of flexibility. We have a lot of interceptor points where core developers, who really know what they’re doing, can intercept various points of that message as it’s going through the system to do some partial processing or validation. We have some work in progress to do, like partial message encryption on some of the XML stuff. That’s done via some of these flexibility touch points, where developers can just take a part of the message and say, “Okay, we are going to encrypt this.” So, flexibility is another big word that’s important from a developer’s standpoint.

We’ve been working on some new features that we haven’t had in some of the previous generations of IONA’s SOA tool. Some of the main ones we have are the REST integrations. If you are not familiar with the Web 2.0/REST stuff, AJAX is the popular word that actually uses it. It’s a different style of interaction, where you do “gets” to get your XML data. Then it is a little bit processed on the client side, a little bit processed on the server side. There’s a lot of scripting going on in the marketplace today. There are a lot of JavaScript developers working with AJAX or doing other types of JavaScript, even on the server side. So, a lot of what we’ve done with CXF is to give those file developers some new tools to produce applications.

We’ve created a set of REST annotations. If you have existing Java services that you want to expose via REST capabilities, your AJAX clients can talk to them. You can annotate the code with these REST annotations, and CXF will pick up on them and do the REST or the SOAP interactions. We also provide support for writing your SOA applications in JavaScript. JavaScript is one of those neat interpreted things for rapid development, where you avoid some of that compile-repackage-redeploy cycle.

With the commercial product there are release cycles of six months or a year, or something like that. A lot of commercial vendors try to figure out what’s going into a particular release six months before it’s even released. So if those Web services specs aren’t finalized six months before release, they may not make that release cycle. In an open-source environment, where you have a constantly evolving development, as soon as these things get finalized, it can be made available almost immediately.

For developers that aren’t familiar with these things, it does give an opportunity to learn about them and use them in something that’s relatively easy. Expanding their knowledge is always a good thing from a career perspective. The more you know, the better off you are.

Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.

 

 SOA and open source with IONA Technologies [40:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (572)

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ALM 2.0 era ushers application development into a managed business process

May 1, 2007 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Sponsored Post, enterprise software, podcasts

Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: Borland Software.

Many people have defined software development as more art than science — sometimes even a dark art. That’s why the business side of an enterprise is often perplexed by the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process. They see what goes in as requirements, and see what comes out as functionality — but they often don’t understand what takes place in between.

Yet new trends are unfolding in ALM, called ALM 2.0, to help organizations transform software development and deployment into a managed business process. Dynamic applications and services oriented architecture (SOA) are also leading toward more componentized software, and that means more pieces to manage in design time as well as runtime. ALM 2.0 therefore points to the need to begin better coordinating between design phases and real-world use and efficiency of applications and services.

To help better understand the implications of ALM 2.0, and how Borland Software with its Open ALM approach is implementing it, I recently moderated a sponsored podcast with Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst at Forrester Research; Brian Kilcourse, CEO of the Retail Systems Alert Group and former SVP and CIO of Longs Drug Stores, and Marc Brown, vice president of product marketing at Borland.

Here are some excerpts:

If you look at most businesses today, IT organizations are expected to have very managed processes for their supply-chain systems and for their human resources systems, but when it comes to software delivery or software development, as you mentioned, there is this sense that software is some sort of an art.

We would really like to demystify this and put some rigor to the process that individuals and organizations leverage and use around software delivery. This will allow organizations to get the same predictability when they are doing software as when they are doing the other aspects of the IT organization. So our focus is really about helping organizations improve the way they do software, leveraging some core solution areas and processes — but also providing more holistic insight of what’s going on inside of the application lifecycle.

ALM isn’t just about developers. It’s really about all the roles that come together to ensure that software meets business requirements — from business analyst, to the architect, to the developer, to the project manager, the tester. And it feels like every year we end up with more specialized development teams than we had the year before. Specialization is great, because it means that we have more skilled people doing jobs, but it also means that we have more functional silos. ALM is really about making sure that every one of those silos is united, that people really are marching toward the same goal — to the same drumbeat. ALM is about helping them do that by coordinating all of their efforts.

In addition to functional silos, we’ve also got technology silos where we have a front-end in .NET, a back-end in Java, and maybe we’re using a BPM tool to create the entire composite application. There are just so many ways that this gets more and more complex. Then, in addition to managing roles, you also have to manage all of these different components and their interdependencies.

In the past, vendors have collected ALM solutions over time by acquiring support for each role. They’d acquire a tool that supported business analysts in the work that they do. Then, they’d acquire a tool that supported testers or test leads and the work that they do. They’d integrate the two, but that integration never ended up being very good. That integration is where ALM comes in. ALM lives in coordinating the work that the tester, the business analyst, and all the other roles involved really accomplish, to make sure that software meets business needs.

As most CIOs have done, I spent untold amounts of money trying to turn the software development process from an artistic activity to an engineering activity. There were a bunch of good reasons for that. One of them is that commercial computing is now over 60 years old. And one would think, at this point, that we would have figured out a way to commoditize it and make it more reliable. But it still remains, even after this long period of time, that software development is easily the most unreliable part of the whole value delivery equation that the IT department brings to the organization.

The fact that we are talking about ALM 2.0 is a big step in the right direction. In our business applications we need to be able to integrate at the information level and the data level, even if they are different code sets or physically different databases. From the business perspective we need to come up with one coherent answer to any kind of a business question. No matter what the toolsets are, we have one way to see them from a business perspective. I think that’s very encouraging.

We know from our business application stack that this is possible. So if it’s possible for the business, why isn’t it possible for the IT organization? You can call this a “cobbler’s children” problem. Why don’t we have for ourselves what we promise to deliver to our business associates?

SOA really does make quality that much more of an issue. We aren’t that good at it for basic, monolithic applications. Imagine how bad we’ll be at it with SOA? I really see SOA giving us an opportunity to do better, because in every service a defect is propagated to every single application that consumes that service. But if the service is high-quality, that quality level is propagated, too. Essentially we have a mandate to do a much better job on quality in our service