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Archives for October 2010

Forrester’s Empowered: Workplace HEROes + DIY Technology = Recipe for Shadow IT Disaster, or Front-Line Innovation?

October 10, 2010 By brenda michelson

Like many with corporate IT backgrounds, I find the do-it-yourself (DIY) technology movement simultaneously intriguing and frightening. Intriguing, because of the ease of connecting with co-workers, partners, customers and information to solve problems, improve interactions and advance the business.  Frightening, because I’ve lived through (barely) the data, network and integration nightmares brought on by islands of Access, Excel, FileMakerPro, Visual Basic, etc.

Of course, today’s DIY technologies – Smart mobile devices, Pervasive video, Cloud computing services and Social technologies – are exponentially more powerful than their office productivity predecessors.  Therefore, they must be exponentially more troublesome, right?  Well, that depends.

In Empowered, a new book by Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, the authors address this very challenge, how to balance front-line innovation with back-room risk management.  Or, as the authors describe it, changing the way your business runs to harness the power of HEROes: highly empowered and resourceful operatives. 

Following an attention grabbing introductory section, the book’s guidance is presented in two more parts.  In part two, the authors focus on HERO projects, describing opportunities and challenges, elucidating with real-world examples, sharing tools and walking through a four-step process to match-up with that other critical DIY base, your empowered customers.

A helpful tool is the HERO Project Effort-Value Evaluation.  After answering a series of questions on a potential projects effort and value, you calculate your projects EVE score.  Scores fall into one of six categories, from no-brainer (value exceeds effort by 25 points) to shadow IT (high effort).  On the Shadow IT projects, the authors don’t say never, however they point out the risk factors, success impediments, and advise collaboration with senior management and IT.

 

In part three, the authors discuss how management, information technology and HEROes work together to achieve that all important opportunity-risk balance.

The critical concept in part three is the establishment of a HERO Compact.  The HERO Compact is an accord between management, information technology and HEROes, guiding each group’s behavior to make “HERO-powered innovation successful”.

In the spirit of empowerment, I’ve clipped the high-level HERO Compact from Amazon’s Search Inside this Book. 

The chapter continues with specific pledges for IT, management and HEROes.  Each pledge reinforces that success requires individual responsibility, collaboration and trade-offs.

For example, the IT Pledge includes: “I will respect requests for new technology support and find ways to say, “Yes, and” rather than automatically saying “No.”. 

The HERO Pledge includes: “If my projects entail a significant effort, I will work with my managers and IT to better understand the long-term impact of those projects”.

And the Management Pledge includes: “I will respect assessments of technology risk in HERO projects and work with IT and others to quantify, mitigate and ultimately manage that risk”.

Empowered does a nice job of describing the compelling workforce and customer benefits of embracing DIY technologies, while painting a realistic view of the traps and risk, and offering pragmatic advice and tools for prospective HEROes, managers and IT to co-create a front-line innovation environment.

Organizations struggling to keep up with their customers, employees or competitors on the DIY technology revolution need to read Empowered and think seriously about HERO Compacts.

 

[Disclosure: Forrester sent me a free “no obligation” copy of Empowered.]

Filed Under: business, business-technology, cloud computing, innovation, social, trends Tagged With: books

InformationWeek Global CIO: Real-time is real-good for Tibco

October 4, 2010 By brenda michelson

Speaking of real-time business, in the Global CIO column, Bob Evans of InformationWeek reports on the “massive promise of real-time business, real-time visibility, and real-time decision-making” as a significant contributor to Tibco’s recent earnings success and go-forward confidence.

From his conversation with Vivek Ranadive, Tibco’s founder and CEO, Evans cites Ranadive’s confidence in the face of “20th century competitors”:

"These are all 20th-century companies [Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft] grasping at the question of ‘How do we become 21st-century companies?’ " he said. ‘How do we change and enhance our core competencies? How do we marry the three great trends of today: event-driven models, cloud computing, and mobility—how do we marry those without destroying our legacy?’ "

On top of that, he said, those big companies with vast rosters of legacy products and entrenched business units find it hard to embrace questions such as "What does the customer of the 21st century look like, or what does the Facebook phenomenon mean to my company, my products, and my customers?"

A large contributor to Tibco’s results was services.  According to the article, the reason is two-fold.  One, customers are aggressively embracing the shift from “transaction-orientation” to event-driven, and two, there is a shortage of relevant third-party skills.  [That’s just fine with me!]

“In a typical engagement we might have a customer with a couple of hundred people on a project and Tibco provides 10% of 15% of them.

"But that is changing—rapidly—and as a result our offshore services business has tripled as we have come across massive—truly massive—opportunities," he said.

"On Sunday, I met with one customer who wants an escalation in Tibco people from the 40 now working on the project to more than 200. This is happening because we want to move them from their old 20th-century infrastructure to event-driven platforms and in order to achieve that with such new technology, we have to do everything.

While projects with hundreds of vendor-supplied consultants tend to make me nervous, it is an interesting data point on customer appetite for change and investment. 

More interesting though was Ranadive’s follow-on statement:

"The tipping point has been reached, and an avalanche of people wanting to do this has started."

And yes, that quote is rhetoric-laden.  However, in his closing, Bob Evans offers some very positive (and colorful) insights of his own:

“I think Ranadive and Tibco would do very well to grow as rapidly as they can in the next 6 months or so because in spite of his zealot’s protestations to the contrary, IBM and Oracle and SAP are going to come after the real-time market like hungry lions on a herd of young antelopes.”

Let the real-time safari begin!

Filed Under: active information, event driven architecture, event processing Tagged With: Tibco

Event Processing Luminaries Flock to Madison Avenue

October 3, 2010 By brenda michelson

This Wednesday, October 6, 2010, a contingent of event processing luminaries including  Roy Schulte, Opher Etzion, and Dr. John Bates, are gathering at Credit Suisse West Auditorium to participate in the Capital Markets Event Processing Symposium.

This promises to be a great day, full of pragmatic insights, real-world stories, cutting-edge technology and future thinking.

Thanks to generous sponsors – IBM, Progress/Apama, Starview Technology, Sybase – it’s only $99 for the day.  So really, how can you go wrong?

View the Program.  Register. See you there!

 

[Disclosure: The Symposium is organized by my client, The Event Processing Community of Practice (EP CoP).]

Filed Under: circuit, event processing

BBC Business News: Real-time (Event Processing) beyond Wall Street

October 1, 2010 By brenda michelson

Thanks to twitter friend @darachennis, I can share a BBC News article on the use of event processing for real-time business beyond Wall Street.  For context, the article describes the use of complex event processing in trading scenarios, citing implementations of Apama and Streambase at a variety of institutions.

As the article continues, other real-time business scenarios are called out, such as port management (logistics), retail (inventory), telecom (network management), healthcare and defense (think spooks).

“Now, real-time processing software has spread beyond Wall Street and the City to other industries.

Apama is used by customers in the Netherlands – Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, with an annual through-put of about 400 million tons – to manage the logistics of ships, which often fail to arrive on time and spend hours waiting to dock and unload at ports, wasting fuel, money and time.

Rather than wait until the end of the day or week, supermarkets and other large multinational retailers use the software to monitor their stock inventories in real-time.

Telecoms companies are using it to manage the strain on their networks. Mobile phone firm Three, in Italy, is using Apama to test whether it can offer customers faster music downloads – for a price – when network usage is low.

SAP’s software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously low.

StreamBase has discussed using its software to monitor patients in hospital, looking for abnormalities and alerting doctors immediately, before the situation becomes critical.

Mr Sikka says a large British gas company recently started using its software to analyse the data from smart meters of 60,000 customers in London, and discovered that there was a spike in energy usage around 7pm.

The firm changed its tariffs to account for that.

Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats.”

I couldn’t agree more with the article’s closing quote, offered by Streambase CEO Mark Palmer, “It’s difficult to think of an industry that isn’t affected by real-time".

Filed Under: active information, event driven architecture, event processing

Top 3 Cloud Computing Stories for September: Dave, Bill and Brenda

October 1, 2010 By brenda michelson

This morning, I joined Blue Mountain Labs’ David Linthicum and Bill Russell on Dave’s popular cloud computing podcast.  Once again, we exchanged our top 3 stories for the month.  We definitely had fun this morning.  From agreeing on the dumbest announcement of the month (or perhaps year) to discussing how cloud computing combats loneliness.

Listen here.

Filed Under: cloud computing, podcasts

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Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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