Marc Andrews Observations On Demand

Steve Mills Talks to Forbes About the Need for an Information Agenda

Steve Mills was recently interviewed by Forbes magazine to talk about how organizations can deal with all of the information now being captured, and use it more effectively to improve their business.  You can read the full transcript in their article Drowning in Data.

He talks about the opportunity for companies to change how they do business and use information for competitive advantage.  He also raises the issue most organizations are facing, which is navigating information overloads to figure out what information they need, and what information is right.

He references an interesting example in banking:

If you look at a large bank, they have a whole set of product offerings ranging from retail banking to brokerage. They have various private customer relationships--trust, annuities and insurance. You may have a variety of accounts, but do they know you as one person? Do they have a master customer view of you so they can up-sell and cross-sell? For most major banks, the answer is, "No, that's a work in progress." Therefore, they miss opportunities to leverage the capacity of their integrated financial institution. In most cases they have a road map to fix that, but they're struggling to get there.

In this article, he suggests that establishing an Information Agenda can help companies get started, and ensure they are investing in the appropriate infrastructure to support more effective use of information.

IBM Named One of the Most Influential Vendors in Enterprise IT

No surprise that IBM was named one of 'The Dozen' most influential vendors in enterprise IT in the Intelligent Enterprise 2009 Editors' Choice Awards. What's more important is recognition that IBM has "the most comprehensive information management portfolio in the business" and the reference to IBM's focus on helping companies build a "trusted information layer." These are some of IBM's key differentiators...along with its unique ability to understand the business of its customers and help them drive more business value from their information.  Here is the full statement from Intelligent Enterprise on IBM:

BI, business process management, content management, event processing, relational database, in-memory database, information integration, mashup technologies, master data management, enterprise search " you name it, and IBM undoubtedly has it in the most comprehensive information management portfolio in the business. The company also has the vision to bring all the pieces together. Cognos was a particularly nice, overlap-free fit for the company, and in 2008 IBM added Business Viewpoint for flexible dimension management in BI, OLAP, analytic and master data management activities. IBM has stayed maniacally focused on helping companies to build a "trusted information layer." What's more, it adds technologies whenever they emerge as important differentiators.

I'm sure that these differentiators are also part of the reason that IBM was able to "defy the economy" with better than expected profits in the last quarter of 2008 and project stronger than anticipated growth for 2009.

Analyst Predictions for Information Needs in 2009

The end of this past year left more for speculation than probably any other year in most of our memories. We're experiencing the most challenging financial crisis we've seen since the Great Depression, plummeting retail sales that will likely change the landscape of the retail industry as much as the banking world has already been changed, continued exponential increases in health care, distrust in our banks and financial markets which has only been compounded by Madoff and what is being described as the largest Ponzi scheme ever, and increased turmoil in the Middle East with terrorism reaching Mumbai and renewed fighting over Gaza.

Of course, this has also led to increased uncertainty. The Dow seems to go up and down by hundreds of points on a daily basis with no clear rhyme or reason. Gas prices continue to fluctuate back and forth. And consumer spending...and investing...is seeming unpredictable. Maybe that's why so many analysts are predicting that companies will need to increase their investments in information in 2009.

IDC, in their report on Worldwide Information Access, Analysis, and Management Software 2009 Top 10 Predictions, talks about the importance of solutions that can "unify access to multiple types and sources of information" and "put better information access and analysis capabilities in the hands of more users." IDC recognizes that IT budgets will be impacted, but suggests that "the economic turmoil will also increase the need for insight into operations, finance, and sales processes." Some of the business drivers they cite include "compliance requirements, the need to compete effectively while keeping down costs, the enterprise information glut, and the recognition that unifying access and management of all types of information improves business processes, increases knowledge worker productivity, and decreases the risk of not understanding the real status of an enterprise because of an imperfect view of its internal information."

Of the top 10, the three I thought were most relevant were:

1. Need for tools to increase the performance and competitiveness of organizations
2. Corporate events (e.g. M&A, executive turnover, staff reductions) will trigger need for investment in capabilities to automate "knowledge" processes with reduced staff
3. Increased need to manage ALL types of information spurred by stricter regulatory compliance and needs for better, more intelligent business monitoring and decision making

Gartner Can't Say Enough About the Need for Enterprise Information Management and Business Intelligence
Gartner has also been jumping on this bandwagon. In fact, in the beginning of December, Gartner release five separate reports, all about this topic.  They started off by introducing a new EIM Maturity Model.  In this report, Gartner claims that organizations cannot implement enterprise information management (EIM) as a single project, but must implement it as a coordinated program that evolves over time. They introduce an EIM maturity model to help organizations identify what stage of maturity they have reached and what actions to take to reach the next level. IBM had actually put together a maturity model almost a year ago, based on experience from several hundred customers that are trying to establish their own information agenda. There is even an information agenda checklist that companies can fill out and submit to get help assessing their own information agenda needs.

Gartner also issued a report on Enterprise Information Management Revisited: Foundations, Progress and Futures, in which they suggest focusing on information governance as a first project for those that are new to EIM, and stress the importance of "defining and socializing" the relationship of enterprise information management to the business and the business role and the benefits that they can expect, as there is still a great deal of misunderstanding as to what "enterprise information management" really means and how it can provide business value.

In Predicts 2009: Enterprise Information Management Will Prove Itself, Gartner makes predictions on the value of EIM and claims that enterprises that adopt EIM can outperform rivals in areas such as operational efficiency, product development and customer service. And in How to Really Do the Five EIM-Related Things Everyone Else Just Thinks They're Doing, Gartner highlights how enterprise information management can yield measurable business benefits, such as increased efficiency of critical cross-company processes and greater information transparency. In fact, IBM's Information Agenda initiative is all about providing guidance on how to realize these benefits and get results you can measure.

Finally, in Predicts 2009: Business Intelligence and Performance Management Will Deliver Greater Business Value, Gartner claims that the current economic crisis shows the importance of trust and transparency in the information that organizations use to run their business. They suggest that companies need to integrate the analytical insights derived from this information into the decision-making processes throughout the organization.

So, it seems that the overwhelming message here is that 1) we're in for some challenging times ahead, and 2) companies need better access to better information to make better business decisions so they can improve their business performance and create a competitive advantage in the market.

Top 100 Focused on Delivering Intelligence to More Employees

InformationWeek just published their 2008 InformationWeek 500 report, revealing IT strategies from the 500 best and brightest companies in North America.  There are some interesting findings in this report, including an analysis of how the "Top 100" compare the rest of the companies in the study.

One of the most interesting is that the Top 100 are less focused on lowering costs and increasing efficiency than the rest, but are instead investing more in initiatives that have the potential to increase revenue and build business by finding new ways to engage their customers through technology and delivering more timely business intelligence to employees.  This is pretty much in line with my comments about the importance of leveraging information in today's unique economic environment.  Another interesting tidbit is that when asked what steps these organizations are taking to optimize the efficiency of their business processes, 89% said they are improving data integration between systems or departments (80% of the rest of the companies were doing the same).

It seems like these investments are driving productivity gains too.  Deploying business intelligence tools and new types of collaboration software were identified as the two most effective steps managers have made in the past 12 months to raise company productivity.  In fact, 34% of the 500 companies surveyed said that they are disseminating better business intelligence to more employees faster - a significant jump up from 18% last year.

There is also an intriguing view into the disparity of BI usage across different industries.  90% of retail companies claim wide deployment of BI tools...100% of general merchandising retailers!  Other high users of BI tools were companies in hospitality/travel, logistics/transportation, distribution and consumer goods.  What surprised me was that banking/financial services organizations were towards the bottom of the list!  Could this be a reason for the financial crisis we're facing now?

Overall, it seems that the leading organizations have realized that the key to competing in today's market is to make your employees smarter by giving them more intelligence.

Leveraging Information in Today's Challenging Economic Environment

So, given all of the challenges we are seeing companies face in today's economic environment, is now the right time to be making technology investments?  In a recent webcast, John Haggerty, from AMR Research, spoke about the challenges companies are facing in today's unique economic environment and what they are doing to address those.  He also specifically talks about "why investing in business intelligence and performance management makes sense...especially now."

The fact is, especially in challenging times, it becomes increasingly important for organizations to make better business decisions.  When times are good and companies are going through high growth, there is a lot more room for error.  However, when some companies are struggling just to survive, it is critical that you make the right business decisions across the enterprise - from strategic decisions around where to take the business, to everyday decisions, such as which loans to approve, how to pay out claims, and how to best respond to customer inquiries.  You cannot afford to make the wrong bets, and you cannot afford to alienate customers.

And the key to making better business decisions is to have the right information.  Have all the relevant information.  Have information that is accurate and can be trusted.  Have information available when and where it's needed.  This is the reason why it is important for companies to make the investments required to establish information as a strategic asset.  And the way to accomplish this is to begin creating an Information Agenda for your organization and focus on how you can better use information to address your key business challenges.

Information On Demand Goes To EMEA

This week, the first EMEA based Information On Demand (IOD) conference was held in The Hague (Den Haag) in the Netherlands.  There were around 2,000 people from across all of Europe, and even some countries in the Middle East and Africa, who made the trip to hear more about how companies are driving more value from their information.

One of the main messages heard at the event was the need for companies to start thinking about their Information Agenda - how they can better leverage information across their organization to drive more business value, the infrastructure they need in place to support this, and a roadmap for how to get there.  Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of the Information Management Software division at IBM, encouraged people to take information to the next level, and to use it as a strategic asset.  He indicated that organizations who establish trusted information will be able to unlock the business value of information for competitive advantage...and those who do not run the risk of being left behind.

René Carayol, international business guru and media personality, invited customers to the stage to share their experiences in implementing their own Information Agendas.  Jacqui Leggetter, from the Department for Work & Pensions in the UK, spearheaded an effort to integrate enterprise content management (ECM) with customer relationship management (CRM).  As a result, the Department reduced a five day paper-intensive process to one, enhancing the customer experience.

Markus Bayha, from Fiducia, the largest IT service provider to the financial services community in Germany, garnered C-level sponsorship to implement a solution that now effectively serves 800 banks.  With its new-found capabilities, Fiducia is able to help customers increase revenue through the sales of new banking products and services, and can now monitor, control and analyze information to drive its future sales and marketing strategy.

In addition, Nick Donofrio, IBM's Vice President of Innovation and Technology, spoke to the attendees, reminding them that harnessing information is an essential element of innovation that matters, which delivers client value, creates new business models, and spurs growth. He encouraged people to combine technology with business insight, and to lead change versus enduring or tolerating it - only with change comes innovation.

Overall, it was a great event that demonstrated the enthusiasm and interest of companies all over EMEA in driving increased business value from their information.  One of the biggest questions this leaves everyone to take away is, what's YOUR Information Agenda?  Do you have one?

Focusing on Business Optimization

Business optimization seems to be one of the latest buzz phrases out there.  But what does this really mean?  And how is this different from what companies have been doing in the past?

Well, for the past two decades, companies have primarily focused their IT investments on automating their business processes, with the objectives of driving faster processing and reduced costs.  This has been driven by an "application" agenda to implement ERP and Financial applications, supply chain management solutions, and call center and CRM applications.  However, these types of investments are no longer creating a sustainable competitive advantage for organizations.

As a result, over the past few years, we've seen new IT initiatives increasingly focused on optimizing business to drive a more sustainable competitive advantage.  Think about it like those old BSF advertisements - we don't make a lot of the things you use, we make a lot of the things you use BETTER!  Business optimization is about making your business processes, customer interactions and everyday operating decisions BETTER. This means moving from just leveraging ERP and financial applications to providing increased financial risk insight for better business decisions...moving from just managing your supply chain to enabling more dynamic demand planning...and moving from just managing your call center and customer relationships to providing increased insights to improve customer service and drive greater profitability from your customers.

These new initiatives are all dependent on information, and having an information agenda in place to ensure that your organization is leveraging all the information at its disposal to create a competitive advantage in the market.  So ultimately, information becomes the key to optimizing your business.

Is Microsoft Ready for Your People When it Comes to Content Management?

Microsoft is making a lot of noise to ask if your people are ready.  However, I'd like to know if they are really ready for your people!  Microsoft has long dominated in providing people with desktop tools and applications.  And while Google, Mozilla, RedHat and other parts of the open source community continue to try and challenge them in this space, they are far from making any significant impact in Microsoft's leadership around Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer or general ownership of the desktop.  It seems that anytime a company comes up with some new innovation, whether it is around desktop search, tabbed web browsing or providing web tools that remain active on your desktop, Microsoft quickly catches up and add those features to the next version of their operating system.

While this will continue to be sufficient for most home consumer usage, this does NOT address the needs of the business user.  An enterprise needs to do more than just provide your typical desktop tools to ensure the productivity of its employees.  It's about more than just people.  An enterprise needs to incorporate the organization's business processes and information into their user's daily lives.  Being "enterprise" ready means tight integration between people, processes and information.  All three are critical - and this is where Microsoft falls short.  They remain behind in understanding or being capable of integrating the vast array of enterprise information sources used across most organizations.  And they cannot tie into and provide access to all of the different processes driving an enterprise's business.  This requires more advanced enterprise integration capabilities and an open platform that enables companies to leverage heterogenous environments - neither of which you get from Microsoft.

A general collaboration platform is not sufficient.  Improving productivity and enabling better decision making requires the ability to deliver the right information directly to business users and enable collaboration within the context of their business processes and activities. This must hold true even if the information is coming from other systems or if the business process is driven by a separate application.  It is also important to have access to more advanced document management and content processing functionality.  Otherwise, organizations end up having to deploy separate systems to support specialized business applications and processes, leading to independent silos of information and requiring users to go to different places depending on what information they need. And organizations must have the ability to apply centralized policies and controls over distributed, departmental systems to address compliance and governance issues.

So as you look to deploy technologies and platforms to make your people more productive, make sure you are thinking about their complete set of needs.  Make sure your system can grow with you to protect your investment and prevent having to deploy siloed systems in the future.  Make sure you are thinking about your people, processes and information.

Does Asia Need Information On Demand?

Many people talk about how Asia is further behind the rest of the world on the technology curve.  As a result, some have questioned whether or not they are ready to start thinking about investing in more flexible information architectures that would enable them to integrate data from across their organization and make all enterprise information more readily available.  My recent trip across Asia led me to some interesting insights.

Earlier this month, over a period of 12 days, I met with people in Malaysia, Tokyo, Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore.  I talked about the concepts of Information On Demand to over 650 people, and was able to have separate conversations about this topic with over 100 of those people.  And as a fun fact, I travelled back and forth across 4 different time zones, logged over 67 hours of plane travel, with 3 overnight flights, and ate local cuisine in every country, which my stomach somehow survived until after I ate the airplane food on my way back to the United States.  And I can't tell you how much money I lost changing currencies every country I went to...they really need the equivalent of the Euro in Asia!

Anyway, back to the serious stuff.  One thing I found to be universal was the fact that companies everywhere have gotten into the habit of building out and deploying independent applications across their organization.  Asia is no different here.  In every country I visited, I heard about organizations that have developed or purchased different applications for their different lines of business.  And they are all using different data stores to manage their information, and have different data models to describe their business.

The difference in Asia is that they are just starting to realize this problem, but it has not yet become accute.  They are just now starting to think about how to look across their organizations, but are more concerned with historical reporting and analysis than real-time views across their enterprise information.  As a result, they are more focused on buidling out data warehouses to consolidate information after the fact.

However, there are a few forward thinking organizations that are starting to recognize that they can get more value out of their information by providing real-time access across the organization.  There are a few innovative companies that are learning that by using information spread across their organization more effectively, they can transform their business processes and create competitive differentiators.

I believe that Asia is indeed ready for Information On Demand.  They have the problems that Information On Demand can address. And investing in Information On Demand capabilities now would be a lot easier for them, since their IT environments have not reached the levels of complexity seen in the companies where this has already become a significant problem.  But many organizations don't know how to best address their information silos or begin putting in place more flexible information architectures.  More education is needed on how to deploy these capabilities, and the benefits/value of taking this approach.  Otherwise, they will just be postponing the inevitable, and will have more complex environments that will be more costly to deal with.

Asia, start focusing on information as a service now!  You will be much better prepared for the future and will be able to focus on innovating your business instead of dealing with information problems.

How is Unstructured and Structured Information Converging?

There is a lot of talk around the "convergence" of structured and unstructured information, but what exactly does this mean?  There are various ways that structured and unstructured information could be combined, each providing different value.  I will try to identify the different approaches in this posting.

While there have been earlier approaches to combining structured and unstructured information, search has been one of the biggest drivers.  Interestingly enough, this is the one driver that is coming from the unstructured side. With the increasing usage of search as a paradigm for users starting their journey to try and access information, the need has begun surfacing to use the simple search box for getting to everything. And while this has been popularized by the Google's and Yahoo's of the world to get to the unstructured information out on the web, companies are now starting to enable searching across their enterprise systems to enable a single query to pull back structured information from application databases and unstructured information from their intranets, portal, file servers and content management systems.

However, the simplest and most traditional way has been to use applications as a common interface for accessing both structured and unstructured information. Many applications just need the ability to display structured and unstructured information side by side. For example, customer data from a CRM and/or order processing system, along with customer documents (contracts, invoices, correspondence, etc.) from content management systems and collaborative applications. Many companies accomplish this through "on-the-glass" integration that involves custom coding to repository specific APIs directly within the application. A newer, and more effective approach is to leverage information integration and content integration middleware products that can provide a common interface for accessing the different underlying systems where the data and content are stored.  Most offerings still require you to use different APIs for structured vs. unstructured systems, but IBM WebSphere Information Integrator now provides a hook into the IBM content integration product (WebSphere Information Integrator Content Edition) so that you can at least query and retrieve both structured and unstructured information through a single interface.

You can take this one step further and create direct associations between related structured and unstructured information. This basically means embedding linkages between data and documents at the data storage level, as opposed to at the application level. The most common approach to doing this is to create links in the business object record (i.e. the customer record, the product record, the order record, etc.) pointing back to any related documents, which are often stored in other systems.

Another, more progressive and recent approach is to turn your data warehouse into an "information" warehouse by incorporating unstructured information. This doesn't necessarily mean copying all of your documents into the warehouse - that would be fairly costly and could put a drain on your system resources given the typical size of unstructured content.  However, as you create that single view of the customer, or of a product, or anything else, you can create links to all of the documents and other types of unstructured information that may be relevant. Those links could point to multiple external systems and be replicated across different objects in your warehouse, but they can provide a common way to get to all information, structured and unstructured, through a single interface.

So, these three approaches have all focused on accessing related structured and unstructured information, but there is another aspect of this convergence that is equally important. And that is creating or applying "structure" to the unstructured. People want to query unstructured information with the ease and effectiveness of querying structured information. They want to report on the knowledge buried in unstructured information the way they report on standard data in a warehouse. And they want to analyze and generate insights from unstructured information the way they can through applying statistical algorithms and predictive analysis on historical and real-time structured data.

Thus, the final approaches involve multiple techniques to create a structured representation of unstructured information that enables all of these capabilities.

The simplest method is to create more structured content in the first place. This involves better tagging of websites and content, and possibly using XML instead of pure text or other document formats. Of course, this places quite a burden on the content creator, and will only get you so far. The next generation of Word will add some better capabilities here, but won't get you to the point of being able to extract any deep knowledge of the underlying content.

Another recent phenomenon, and an approach that may become viable for widely accessible content is social bookmarking, or tagging. Pioneered by del.icio.us, this entails users "tagging" content they review with additional metadata that can then be used by others to find that content and understand what it is about. This may sound a little convoluted, but it is becoming a fairly popular practice and has real benefits.  After all, wouldn't you trust the opinion of a real person that has looked at the content more than some automated crawler and indexer? And yes, people are actually doing this!  Just check out the success of del.icio.us (purchase by Yahoo for a handsome sum) and wikipedia (the largest resource of information gathered solely through public collaboration and contribution).

The final approach, and the most effective if done correctly, is to apply text analytics to extract concepts, entities, facts and other types of knowledge from unstructured content to create a more structured representation of the content. This is something I've blogged on before and is a major focus of the UIMA framework. Since the knowledge is extracted into a structured format, it can be sent to a database, a search index, or a business process, where it can be more easily queried, included in reports, and analyzed. And isn't that what we want to be able to do with all information?  Find it, report on it, and understand it.

In a future blog, I will talk about actual use cases where some of the above capabilities can be of extreme value.