I'm stumped by irrational behavior from large technology corporations, especially ones that feel that they have big muscles and have earned the right to such behavior. They go to any lengths to be winning, and do not realize that what they think is collateral damage from their perspective, can be a serious business factor in the future.

What do these companies think? do they even think before they get on an assault charade? do they care for ethics and values? if they do not, do we also start questioning their ethics and values?

The end result of such negative behavior is the loss of trust in the long course from their own customers and marketplace. Sadly their focus is on today's gain and not the overall future perspective probably, which to an extent explains such behaviors. One does not know how many times these companies have lost business due to these behaviors.

I hope that at some point in time, these corporations and their management do realize the value of earning the trust of their customers and the market is very important for their continued success and it is not just technology or financial glories that carry an impact.

In the past few days I have been seeing a flurry of corporate activity in Twitter, Facebook etc from large corporations like Schwab, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret etc. Not only have they got the corporate websites, catalog advertisements, direct mail, email, now they are connected in the "digital world".

The reason these companies and others have the "digital" presence, is because today you need to be connected to the customer to create a positive business impact for the business. How do you stay connected? only if you keep listening. With the advent of social media, the world has shifted from a passive to an active participant in providing businesses feedback. Not only is the feedback public, it is also creating disruptive impacts.

Then there is also the question of competitive threats and also collaborative opportunities. Due to all these business impacts, Social Media is becoming a very essential business requirement for businesses today

There is a TDWI night school that I'm holding on this topic next week for two days. If you are attending, we will see you there.

As you look at the Web2.0 and Web 3.0 world, it is becoming clear that information management on the internet with respect to data will be a catalyst to your success or failure in the new world order. Traditionally when you build applications in the Web, you do not look at it being very data savy and largely transactional in nature. But looking at the way Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Social networks have changed the game, we understand that no longer are we looking at a transactional silo, but rather need to react to a "long tail".

In the new world, you will need to be "big" but "nimble", large and flexible. Wow that's a mouthful to keep saying. The reason for this thinking is we need to look at the structured and the unstructured data to understand the customer and their needs, and react quickly to address those needs. When you talk of unstructured data, in a Web world you cannot afford to load Gigabytes and Megabytes of data, most of which is noise. You need to get the intelligence extracted and linked, but leave the content and the context outside. How do you accomplish this? there are some companies addressing this need, but we need a nimble and strong ETL engine to do this process.

This is where you need to look at Textual ETL and understand how to build the unstructured database. The traditional vendors are doing their part, but the end result has left a lot to your imagination.

Textual ETL is complex and deals with data which has minimal structure and completely 180 degrees opposite of transactional data. As we move towards the Web 2.0 --> Web 3.0 world, we will encounter this hurdle and I hope there are tools that will handle this Large data management to integrate the transactional and textual data.

I have seen large organizations fail with providing successful BI services. Often the blame is on the quality of service that was provided in terms of people and technology. But dig deeper and you will see that a lack of cohesive focus is where that organization would have lost the impetus in providing the service.

One may ask what is cohesive focus. When you deal with a large organization, there are multiple processes and teams involved. There is bound to be different levels of maturity amongst the teams and this gap leads to lack of clarity and hence the lack of cohesive focus.

What are the signs of lack of focus? the warning signs will start when you see an alignment issue between the different managers in the team. The earliest warning will be when a single point of contact cannot be deployed to the project. When these signs manifest, I urge both the service provider and the customer organization to start working together at the earliest to mitigate downstream issues.  Often the damage is done by the time either organization realizes the situation.

When service providers decide to engage in program services, one word of advise, ensure that your organization is having checks and balances to avoid surprises. If you lack the desired level of maturity, ensure that you do not oversell the client expectations. Another food for thought is to develop a mutually agreed scorecard to monitor and correct course over the period of service.

No analyst organization will provide a course on how not to fail. But if you are too large or too small an organization, watch out for the lack of cohesive focus, which is your achilles heel.

Remember since this is a competitive domain, there will be no sharing of best practices or approaches. Learning from introspection is the best approach.