|
An essential to any planning, whether strategic or not, is a clear and accurate model of the future. Architects have often led the way with their realistic models of future office buildings. Those of us in IT are envious because models of future information systems often are lacking. Further, it is much more difficult to model the future organizational structures and business processes of the people who will inhabit those buildings.
Here is an interesting development that uses virtual world (VW) technology. The Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH) is constructing the new Palomar Medical Center West hospital that will open in 2011. Partnering with Cisco, a full-size model of that hospital has been created virtually in Second Life. See this two-minute video pitching their vision of the Hospital of the Future. For more details, check out this press release and blog from Cisco. The virtual hospital is located here in Second Life.
The interesting part is that hospital model includes more than walls and windows. The interior organization of labs, operating rooms and the like, along with the associated equipment, can be quickly and easily changed. Further, simulations of critical healthcare procedures, like surgical operations, can be conducted to tune facilities design, information flows, and care processes. They have over three years to conduct these refinements prior to actual operation.
It will be instructive to monitor the activities surrounding this virtual hospital to see the specific ways that the eventual operation of the real hospital will be impacted. Even more instructive is to watch for uses of the virtual model AFTER the hospital is in operation.
A previous article about serious games in VW argued that there are four levels of modeling. The highest is where the virtual model reflects reality in real-time and changes to the model are reflected back as changes in the real world. Perhaps hospital administrators will find that managing the virtual model will provide insights to improving real healthcare to real patients.
As an analyst, it is fun to investigate a well-defined product area with vigorous competition. The positioning statements by vendors are often content-free and even humorous, reflecting many intense hours of debate. I understand; I have been there.
Data Warehouse Appliances (DWA) has been one of those well-defined areas. They are SQL boxes. Feed SQL statements in one end, and results stream out the other end. They are able to leap wide tables in a single scan, faster than a speedy join path, and so on. You get the point.
The marketplace has changed in the last few years. Those simple DWA products are not so simple, stretching our notions of SQL boxes. This category burring is a healthy reaction to market pressures.
In our DWA research study of 2007, Colin White and I recognized this trend toward higher and diverse functionality within the DWA marketplace. We create a new category called Data Management Appliance, which we defined as offloading data intensive operations from a host computer, such as operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing. Looking back, this was a bandaid on a much deeper issue.
That research did contributed the concept of an appliance as requiring:
* One Purpose – clear purpose
* One Package – tested, ordered, and delivered as a single system
* One Install – installed and maintained as a single system
* One Support – single point of service provided by a single vendor
This was amplified into the 9 dimensions of an appliance in a later article.
I am currently starting on the 2008 DWA Research Study, which will use this revised definition of an appliance. However, will the DWA label survive our scrutiny?
I doubt it at the conceptual level. DWA has historical value, popular recognition, and partial validity. However, the marketplace is definitely moving into an era of enterprise appliances that are evolving beyond SQL boxes.
The deep issue is how modular elements, like appliances (or whatever you wish to call them), should fit into the enterprise architecture. For several decades, enterprise systems were architected in an artistic fashion…a little piece here and another there. Some were truly works of art that even work sometimes. The world is changing too quickly to have that kind of artistic luxury. Besides the artists are getting old and retiring.
Data warehousing fits as a module (appliance) within the enterprise architecture. The challenge is to delineate the other modules (appliances) that will also fit into that enterprise architecture of the future.
Should I change the title of our research study to Appliances as Modules for Building Enterprise Systems? What do you think?
It was a pleasant surprise to receive the new book by Cindi Howson entitled Successful Business Intelligence. She has always impressed me as a thoughtful and knowledgeable professional who has contributed greatly to the BI field by living in the trenches, digging into the details, and teaching others about her experiences.
It is hard to find a comprehensive book on BI that is written without an impenetrable cloud of technical concepts. Ten years ago, successful BI depended on the expert execution of those technical concepts. However, BI has matured, increasing the importance of nontechnical factors for successful BI.
This book tracks this trend by clarifying the current success factors for successful BI projects. Oldies and goodies are covered, such as the necessity of executive support, data quality, and business-IT partnership. However, the real contribution lies in highlighting some of the new success factors, such as:
- Measuring Success: If you can not measure BI, you will not be successful. The book suggests numerous ways to measuring your BI effort.
- Role of Luck, Opportunity, Frustration and Threat: We hate to admit it, but BI projects are often successful (or not) for reasons beyond our control or even our imagination. Get over it! The book suggests ways of maximizing your success by making you aware of this dynamic.
- Agile Development: Do not build BI systems in the old traditional way. We all know this. But do we know a good alternative? The book outlines the Agile Manifesto to deliver early and continuous versions, embrace requirements changes, intensify person interactions, etc.
- Organizational Culture: Experienced BI professionals realize that some company cultures are so messed up that there is no way to have a successful BI project. Sad but true! This book suggests the essential cultural characteristics based on the research of Jim Collins.
I highly recommend this book to both BI professionals who have some experience and business executives who are new to BI. The old timers can refocus and sync with the new trends. And, the executives can focus on the real business issues, avoiding paralysis over technical details. In fact, buy several copies to pass along to your colleagues. Maybe, just maybe, this will reduce the frequency that you are asked, “Now what do you really do with this BI stuff?”
I was watching the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds Friday when they showed a short video during a break. It was called Shift Happens and had a profound message about educating the next generation. I searched YouTube, found it, and circulated the link to several colleagues. One colleague (my son Eric) replied that it was actually another YouTube video. Two identical videos? Hmmmm So, I investigated.
There are actually more than 20 variations. Here are some better ones:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RXNWwGUsBU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUsYFCfmNMo
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfunyCeU5g
They all started in August of 2006 by Karl Fisch with a PowerPoint presentation to a group of teachers. The original title was Did You Know. Fisch's thoughts, along with his original materials, are available at...
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html
Scott McLeored remixed the Fisch material with better fonts, rewording, “upbeat” soundtrack, and YouTubed it! For details from McLeod, see...
http://scottmcleod.typepad.com/dangerouslyirrelevant/2007/01/gone_fischin.html
That was in January. It went viral! And, it has spawned many subsequent variations. The first link above has more than 2.4 million views!
The bottom line: This is a thought provoking video that is well worth 5 minutes of your time. In Fisch’s words, “I remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others.” In a delight way, I must say. It challenges many old notions of world order and technology. It is especially pertinent for educators of today’s youth. The world that these youth will experienced will be quite different than what we have experienced.
Oh, about Karl Fisch... He is a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, just a few miles from where I live in Boulder. Global thoughts in a small world!
Over breakfast I had a delightful chat with Richard Buckle, an experienced, well-traveled student of the IT industry. He is quite a blogger, rather extensive in his comments and subtle (not!) in his humor. See his latest blogging creation.
An issue that surfaced amid our eggs and pancakes was the impact of Web 2.0 technology. I was relaying my perceptions from the IBM IOD Conference. In particular, I was surprised by IBM's emphasis of Web 2.0 as an essential part of future enterprise architectures. I even queried a panel of IBM executives on the sanity of executing such flaking technology on sacred mainframe systems.
The answer that I got involves the careful choosing of one's IT battles within the enterprise. Given the demands of today's global businesses and given the complexity of relevant information to the business, traditional IT has no hope to satisfy all those requirements. Doing IT as the same will result in a chaos far beyond the proliferation of user-created spreadsheet systems of the last decade. Using Web 2.0, leave the User Interface layer to the users, because each will want something different and will want it NOW.
Choose, instead, battle lines around supplying quality enterprise information through a Service Oriented Architecture organized by key business processes.
Hmmmm This is a new twist - a political one - to the whole SOA discussion. For more details, see Richard's blog.
In a briefing by Vertica today, I revisit a number of familiar database concepts, such as column-oriented store and data compression. The list of players involved with Vertica is very impressive, from Michael Stonebraker as founder and CTO to Don Haderle as an advisor. However, I wondered how a new DBMS vendor could emerge successfully in a market that is consolidating. The question that kept bugging me was...
What is new about Vertica that was not invented and commercialized decades ago?
It seems that the appropriate analogy is that of taking several old wines and blending them together in a new wine skin. Here are the old wines:
1) Column-oriented store, which is great on query performance but terrible on update/load performance
2) Data compression, which is great on size reduction (10% to 20% of the raw data) but terrible on compress/decompress processing
3) Multiple sort orders, which is great for forming multiple indexes for complex queries but terrible on duplicating data
4) Dual data spaces optimized for reading and writing respectfully, which is great for absorbing an update stream but terrible on the query engine to operate concurrently on two different structures.
Mixed thoroughly together and pour into commodity hardware running Linux. And I must say that the resulting wine was... well... fascinating.
Vertica has been quietly selling product for three quarters and has about 50 customers. Their pricing is solely based on data volume, rather than the number and size of processors. Current partnerships include Business Objects, JasperSoft, Informatica, Talend, and interestingly Hewlett-Packard.
Vertica is a company to watch and expect a launch of a second version sometime next year.
Sometimes you start reading a book with low expectations about its significance. But, the book surprises you and delivers a message of great significance. That has happened with a new book entitled The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a professor of the Sciences of Uncertainty (an odd title) at the University of Massachusetts. See his Wikipedia entry and a PBS podcast.
Let me start with the bottom line. I strongly recommend this book for all professionals in Business Intelligence (BI) who care about the means and results of our profession upon our clients.
I have this naïve belief that more information is better, assuming that the information is relevant to the business, properly cleansed, structured cross-functional, analyze appropriately, distributed to the right people and so on. This book totally negated that belief, instilling a humble attitude toward how much we can not know and shocking me about how much our current BI practices do damage to our clients.
And... I have just read the first few chapters. I am starting to be aware of the problems in general, confused about their implications to BI, and wondering whether there are any solutions. This is a book that will take several months to consume (because you read a few sentences, think ‘what?’ and then reread it several more times).
Let me give a small taste of Taleb’s argument. Before Australia was discovered, everyone knew that all swans were white, because all swans that were ever observed were white. Therefore, rule of nature was that all swans are white. Someone discovered a black swan in Australia. That one swan negated a belief held for a thousand years by all of mankind. Afterward, people concocted explanations as to why such a rare animal was perfectly normal and should have been expected. Taleb then extends this analogy to explain the events and aftermath of September 11, along with many other pivotal events in human history.
That is the Black Swan. It is a totally unexpected, but significant, rare event that seems plausible...afterwards. In Taleb’s words, the Black Swan is an event with three attributes: “First, it is an outlier as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact [changing our basic paradigms that explain the world]. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
I submit that we are unprepared to handle the Black Swan with current BI technology and practices. In fact, current BI does more harm than good, by giving us a false sense of reliability in what we think we know.
Help me with my struggle to understand the practical importance of the Black Swan. I would like to get a discussion established on Black Swan issues within the BI profession, along with joint publications with some of you. Is there anyone interested in this pilgrimage?
Prof. Behnam Tabrizi of Stanford University has published a book whose title intrigued me. He has an impressive resume, having studied over 100 companies worldwide with McKinsey and written many publications, one of which received a scholarly award from Administrative Science Quarterly. Since I have researched the business value of low-latency data, I had high expectations that his book would give me insights into how real-time generates that value.
Prof. Tabrizi defines the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE) as based upon: getting the right data about the right processes to the right people at the right cost and at the right time to create and sustain competitive advantage. His thesis is that RTE failures are caused in three areas:
- Strategy: creating competitive advantage, reducing uncertainty and complexity
- Planning: achieving desired ROI, resolving critical discontinuities and latencies
- Implementation: capturing, monitoring, analyzing, interpreting data
He then divides the RTE into five modules: ERP, SCM, CRM, ERM (Employee) and PLM (Project Lifecycle). He illustrates his points with dozens of case sketches (mini-studies) from notable companies in a variety of industries.
I was disappointed with the book overall because I did not find those expected insights. In particular, I was concerned about:
First, the use of the term ‘right’ five times in RTE definition begs for more detail. What is ‘right’ is a subjective judgment that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Second, competitive advantage is overused giving the impression that RTE is one that is constantly looking over one’s shoulders at what competitors are doing. This looking backward, rather than forward, gives the wrong message that innovation only comes from competitive threats.
Third, the five modules for RTE systems seem passé by oversimplifying and even fragmenting the enterprise into silo applications.
One glimmer of insights was contained in Table 2-1, which expanded on the factors for reducing complexity and uncertainty.
In summary, the case sketches are worth the price of the book, but lower your expectations for receiving insights into the mechanisms of real-time to deliver business value.
The opening keynote was delivered by Philip Rosedale, CEO and president of Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life (SL). They affectionately referred to him El Presidente, reinforcing my impression of him as a visionary who is friendly and persuasive.
To his credit, he started humbly by admitting the poor reliability of Second Life. He wore a white t-shirt with big black block lettering saying “Missing Image”, which occurs when SL has insufficient computing resources to properly construct the image of your avatar. This sent a strong message to his audience that he is fully aware of their concern for reliability. SL is just over 90% uptime including planned update outages. He quipped, "That's one nine, and it's better to have one nine than not any nines at all." I take this as a positive statement and hoping that at next year's conference he can argue that it is two or three nines.
Because SL is so complex, requiring constant innovations in grid computing. The next enhancement will be for different versions of the server to operate together. Eventually this innovation will avoid shutting down the entire grid for a version change several times per month.
Linden Labs was only received $20 million in venture capital to get to their current level of sustainable revenue. Rosedale predicted that, if the company had been traditional in its development strategies, they would never have been able to built SL to its level today. However, they have been driving SL toward better reliability. Over the last month, they introduced SL Voice, a major new capability of voice-to-voice chat sessions like Skype. At its peak usage, there have been 13 thousand people talking at the same time. All this was accomplished without disruptions in SL operations, as Rosedale proudly noted.
Over the past year, the international participation in SL has increased tremendously, to where residents from the US are only 25% of the total. SL is becoming a major influence on flattening the world and sharing cultures from one person to another.
Rosedale ended by predicting that SL will be bigger than the Web, when the technological problems are solved eventually. He remarked, “We do not appreciate how big this thing [SL] will get."
He is obviously a visionary, some of whom only blow hot air and some of whom change the world. So far, Linden Labs have accomplished a lot. But, the task ahead is a hundred or thousand times as large. Follow this one closely!
A year ago, I attended the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) on a whim. It coincided with a business trip and seems like a fun thing to do. I came away with a collage of fragmented thoughts. The event was a blending of a StarTrek convention with a school reunion. There were hugs everywhere among folks with alternative styles in dress and speech.
This year I returned to SLCC with a focus. Could this virtual world technology have an impact upon our profession in Business Intelligence (BI)? This seems like a ridiculous question, but I believe that it is not. I had the same feeling 15 years ago when the Web was beginning to have an impact on businesses. Remember that the Internet and early Worldwide Web was initially dominated by universities and research institutes. To post a commercial advertisement was against community rules. To send an unsolicited email was the depth of rudeness. Oh, how times have changed!
I wrote an article on Serious Games in Virtual Worlds where I argued that BI will evolve into four levels of serious games. The highest level has a close coupling of the real world of an enterprise with an abstract version in the virtual world. By analyzing, experimenting and planning in the virtual world, appropriate actions could be implemented in the real world toward a goal, such as servicing a customer. IBM has announced that a 24x7 customer center is operational in Second Life, where a real qualified employee will answer questions and discuss problems one-on-one with a customer.
Will virtual world technology, like Second Life, enhance the current two-dimensional Web with increased functionality? Or, will this technology open new opportunities, currently undreamt, for conduct the business of the future?
|
