Today’s ERP environments are well aware of the real-time and up-to-date need for information and facilitate much of the analysis needed in three ways:
• By providing the analysis within the ERP system
• By flexibly allowing for data warehouse feeds
• By enabling enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII) for interchange with other operational systems and cross-system queries

I completely agree, but I also feel it's a matter of maturity, and mature BI environments can get there. I also believe it's a best practice to measure and that it has a high correlation to overall "success", whether success is defined by the numbers or otherwise.

Following are some focuses, in order from healthiest to unhealthiest, that business intelligence programs fall into. As we progress through the focuses, you will notice the focus gets further and further away from the user.

Business Focus #1: Return on Investment
ROI is the holy grail of focus for business intelligence. Those teams that focus on achieving it have learned what business intelligence is all about. Studies have shown that driving toward ROI highly correlates to self-reported program success scores. The focus on ROI just seems to encourage the development team to work backwards to doing the right things day in and day out for the ultimate arbiter of success - the bottom line. Ultimately, to claim this focus, a team must have a great handle on the succeeding focuses well.

Business Focus #2: Data Usage
Those programs that don't measure ROI or are too removed from business processes that drive ROI but still want a business-focused BI program focus on the usage of the data. The objective here is increasing numbers and complexity of usage. With this focus, user statistics such as logins and query bands are tracked; however, little is understood about what the users ultimately do with the results.

Business Focus #3: Data Gathering and Availability

Jeffrey Ma was the keynote speaker at the MDM Summit Sunday night in San Francisco. He is the subject of the (current top box office) movie "21" about the MIT Blackjack team that took their system to Vegas on weekends. The system gave them, at most, a 2% advantage over the house. When deployed over time, that is sure to be most profitable. I saw the movie and I really enjoyed it.

One thing you'll notice, if you saw the movie, is that Mr. Ma does not look like the actor who portrayed him in the movie, who is Caucasian.

Aaron Zornes, Chief Research Officer for the MDM Institute, kicked off the session by rightfully announcing that CDI (customer data integration) was important in bringing the MIT team down.

The team's success at blackjack came from the same places where our success in other business comes from: trust and teamwork, planning and organization, common goal setting and commitment to analytics.

LOCATION:
The Colonnade Center
15305 Dallas Parkway
Suite 300
Addison, Texas 75001

DRIVING DIRECTIONS:
FROM D/FW AIRPORT
• Take the North exit from terminal.
• Go east on Interstate 635 to Tollway North exit.
• Exit Belt Line Road/Arapaho Road.
• This is a toll road so be prepared with change.
• Go through the intersection at Belt Line Road.
• Turn left at Arapaho and cross over the tollway.
• Colonnade III is located on the south-west corner of the Arapaho-Tollway intersection.
• (Approximately 20 - 25 minutes without traffic)

FROM LOVE FIELD AIRPORT
• Take Cedar Springs south to W.
• Mockingbird Lane turn left.
• Turn left onto Dallas Tollway (North).
• This is a toll road, so be prepared with change.
• Exit Belt Line/Arapaho.
• Go through the intersection at Belt Line Road.
• Turn left at Arapaho Road (cross over tollway).
• Colonnade III is located on the south-west corner of the Arapaho-Tollway intersection.
(Approximately 20 minutes without traffic)

DIRECTIONS:
• Located on Seventh Avenue between 31st and 32nd Streets with easy access to mass transportation in and around Metro New York.
• Across the street from the world famous "Garden" sports arena.

With lawyers pouncing immediately with class-action suits on the perpetrators, fines and shame, why does the vast majority of the data which is interesting to theives still unencrypted and vulnerable? My Gartner Top 10 review didn't include encryption, not because it should not be there, but because I have yet to see much being done about it. I'm looking for the tipping point, like about 1988 in the credit card business, where credit cards companies got serious about fraud and made it reduce dramatically, to levels it has stayed at ever since.

Perhaps data breach has become so common, it's not viewed as problematic.

These events are not going away anytime soon.

"ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service management, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems.

ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and governmental practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming a de facto standard used by some of the world's leading businesses."

Technorati tags: ITIL

I talk about the necessity and structure of information leadership, including new concepts of an Information Management Competency Center and Information Management Governance. I talk about the 2 directions data warehouses can go now and federating and consolidating those warehouses. Finally, there's where analytics are going to be coming from and some of the analytic value of modern ERP.

In each of the 4 areas (organization, data warehouse, operations, analytics), I give you a "checklist" of the most relevant questions to ask of your shop and seek answers to.

The paper is available at this link or on my channel here at the B-eye-network.

Why would you want to do such a thing? No, I don't mean come to the session, I mean MDM itself. Come to find out. The top six frameworks for MDM justification will be presented. Link.

I think there are probably 3 reasons for the finding:
1. Those who get MBAs have management aspirations and managers make more.
2. The trend of IT personnel holding H1s without MBAs and without management/higher pay aspirations. IT has grown this way without as many in management layers.
3. IT really is business oriented and to thrive, one needs to be very attuned to the business. MBAs help IT personnel understand that focus better. IT success is certainly very much more about the business than college made it out to be!

Technorati tags: Information Technology, MBA

Overall, I think it is an excellent list. Not everything is apples-to-apples, but as far as concepts go, I agree with the article "urging IT executives to think about the risk of not implementing each one."

One I was looking for that is missing is some variant of the outsourcing/offshoring theme. I think this merits serious attention as well. The other one I was looking for and didn't find is open source, which should see some significant usage increase in 2008.

Green IT takes Gartner's top spot. While I could quibble about its positioning and the naming of the item, reducing TCO in the data center is undoubtedly a business driver for 2008. Power is increasingly a limited, and costly, resource. Furthermore, most CPUs there are unused at any point in time and most programs run unaware of machines other than the one it is directed to run upon. This leads essentially to Gartner technology #5, Virtualization. There will be a need to abstract the logical from the physical in coding to effectively utilize the CPUs and reduce their overall number in achieving the same results, thereby reducing power consumption and TCO.

In Information Management, Data warehouse appliances in particular will need to show thier green creds to succeed. Datupia came out this week with a press release of thier latest model touting its energy efficiency. Kudos Datupia.

Otherwise, I really like technology #4 - Metadata Management. We continue to have islands of data, but even if/when they consolidate, understanding that data and effectively leveraging it for query or programming continues to be complex. Too complex. Metadata has suffered in the past from overblown, impractical, metadata-only projects and what's happening is shops are learning that it's really best done on a project-by-project basis. This reality will help see Metadata Management earn its place on this list.

Technorati tags: gartner, outsourcing, virtualization, Green IT, metadata

This is a very thoughtful piece about the evolution of RFID and how the centralized versus decentralized question frames up for RFID architectures. It starts "Although people currently think in terms of “RF” (radio frequency) tags that “ID” (identify) and track products and other assets through supply chains, RFID tags will eventually be thought of as very small computers that happen to have a built-in wireless networking capability. In other words, it is only a matter of time until virtually every item with a RFID tag can become a programmable/intelligent node on a private extranet, a private intranet, or the public Internet. What this means is that RFID tags are on a path to becoming the basic building blocks and the volume driver of pervasive computing."

The rest can be found on my channel .

Technorati tags: rfid

Network Appliance has sued Sun Microsystems for intellectual property infringement, specifically related to ZFS, the zettabyte file system that Thumper utilizes.

Dave Hitz, Founder and Executive Vice President of Network Appliance, explains their position here and Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems replies in his blog here.

In triangulating this, it could be a problem for Greenplum.

At this link, there's $100 off for my blog readers.