Fun times in business intelligence are emerging. We’re enjoying a unique trend emerging in business, identified by the quantitative approaches and stories identified in recent popular books such as SuperCrunchers and Competing on Analytics. The trend is moving away from the traditional reporting dashboards and single threaded predictive systems geared to present a user with a single view of the future based on a single set of inputs/assumptions. The newest technologies and visualization capabilities are presenting firms with a really slick way to evaluate a set of strategic alternatives in one of two ways… to present multiple variants of a strategy in a manner that allows direct correlation or to present those same variants in a simulated environment. Technology has developed to a point where we have ready access and availability to the technology that enables this type of analysis.
Strategic Alternatives
November 12th, 2007Office Business Applications…
June 21st, 2007… a new coat of paint on an old concept. In so many ways, Microsoft has really cool technology that no one knows about. What Microsoft is now calling ‘office business applications’ is a perfect example. Until recently, they’ve tried to sell this to the market, and the partner community at ‘Smart Clients’. At our firm, we didn’t liek that moniker, so we’ve taken to calling our services around that same thing ‘Office Application Integration’. Whatever you call it, I’m excited that Microsoft has at least taken another stab at trying to sell the capabilities that are inherent to Microsoft Office in a new way.
What Microsoft has done such a terrible job at is communicating the breadth of capabilities available to Office users regarding integrating their Office applications to their current line of business applications. In our recent experience, this has meant integrating Outlook into a client’s Siebel CRM system or a custom Java-based, Oracle database, application. Microsoft has also packaged this up around one line of business app, SAP, and launched their DUET project in the past year.
However you dress this up, it means a dramatic ability to disconnect data from line of business applications and get that data to a user through a familiar, commonly used application, such as Outlook, Excel, Word, etc. We’re finding clients who have these behemouth systems very interested in talking about this for reasons I’ll be explaining in future posts.
Collaboration on the Fly…
December 5th, 2006I saw an online demo of the Koral collaboration and content management system, and I was blown away by the features and capabilities of the system. How awesome is it that tools like what Koral has created can truly democratize the collaborative experience often reserved for the big enterprise apps. I’m a fan of these collaborative tools for enabling real business innovation.
Koral seems to have the table stakes functions for collab tools, but it also has some breakout features, including allowing the folks who submit artifact to tag items, great structured and unstructured data search, and a slick synchronization feature that allows users to drag and drop a folder to the desktop and keep artifacts sync’d. One of the breakouts in terms of the common language around the system seems to be the lack of talking about a file/folder structure. In this era of unstructured search, we’ll see these types of structures become less important as artifacts and content are structured by use or function rather than location.
Koral is onto something worth watching.
This isn’t a phone…
November 27th, 2006… it’s the thing that used to be used as a phone. I’ve been working on getting more productivity out of my Smart Phone in the last few weeks. Trying to get the thing set up so I can automate more of my life and collaborate with my business colleagues and friends better. It’s a lesson in how fragmented the web actually is. I do love the convenience of consolidating communication media, i.e., phone, multiple email accounts, MSN IM, SMS. That’s great. Obviously, access to contacts is great. It’s also great that you can work Excel spreadsheets, view PPTs, read and edit Word docs. Heck, I can even install Acrobat and view PDFs. Photos and videos are gravy to me.
What’s hard is that it’s still a very Microsoft-oriented device. I’m ok with that, but even within its Microsoft orientation, I have trouble getting the Microsoft products to integrate. Windows Media Mobile has been great for MP3s and WMAs, but it’s very difficult with video and impossible with other audio formats. There are just no options for plugins, etc., to get access to these other audio formats. While the camera is a nice feature that seems to be important for consumers, quality’s a challenge and you have to do a conversion to get them to work outside of Windows Media Mobile. What drove me crazy today is that I can’t seem to find any upgrades or patches to account for Office 2007 file format changes.
I’m sure there’s more to come, e.g., longer battery life, compatibility issues addressed, and form factor, which I didn’t mention.. This thing just doesn’t drop into a shirt pocket. More to come.
Performance Points
November 13th, 2006Continuing on process portfolios… the point of performance becomes the most granular measuring point within the business process. The context in which a task is performed is critical to understanding how to make the individual more effective/productive in the execution of a task. In my training on business process improvement/reengineering, I’ve always been so focused on the excution of the task and how to make the individual more productive. This line of thinking on process portfolios and the work i’ve been doing lately on a reporting project has caused me to realize that the performance of a single individual is important, but it’s not the most critical component. I dread getting into an activity-based costing discussion, but the overall performance of a process or set of processes in the portfolio of processes is the most important component in process improvement. Not to get too philosophical, but the individual tasks and performance must be second or lower in priority to overall execution of the process. I’ve always had a hunch that we have given too much power to the individual performer in organizations, and as I look at data coming in off of the floor of my most recent client, i believe that I’m finding a justification for this belief. I’m going to develop my thinking in this forum.
Search has changed my life…
November 13th, 2006I’ve had a multi-year road to my new belief that unstructured search has changed my life. Long ago… like three years ago… I used a simple Outlook add-on called Lookout. It allowed me to search all my email and caused me to stop worrying so much about the granular filing of my emails so I could retrieve my ’stuff’. (My highly organized wife is now cringing.) I used this, and still do on my home PC, and early on, could amaze my colleagues with the ease I could put my fingers on any email I hadn’t deleted… and, depending on my indexing options, some I had deleted. Soon, I could search for attachments within those emails, and the oohs and aahs continued.
Here we are at the end of ‘06. Desktop search tools are so prevalent that, at some point in the past 12 months, I’ve had one or more of the search tools from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft on my laptop. For a long time, I had settled on Google until I upgraded to Office 2007 this past Summer. When the update for the new Microsoft search came out this Fall, I upgraded, fell head over heels, and I’m not looking back. When I recently rebuilt my laptop, I only installed the Microsoft search, but not because of the XP/Office 2007 search capabilities. I was sold on Microsoft search on one of my recent visits with my buddy Rick at Microsoft. He showed off the new OS integrated search that’s in Vista and the new enterprise search that’s rolling out with the new Microsoft Office server products. Awesome. The indexing is more efficient than Google. It integrates natively to SharePoint and Exchange. Awesome. For my clients, it’s a fraction of the cost at scale of the Google solution.
I’m going to keep watching the Google solution because it’s very good on the desktop, but Microsoft has close the gap so fast and at a scale that accelerates past Google’s enterprise search, you can’t help, even if think Microsoft is the evil empire, but be impressed by. Check out what they’re doing and let me know what you think.
Spinning a Portfolio
October 19th, 2006I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about a couple of client problems related to turning around a business unit or making a business more efficient. As we’ve delved into the detail of the problems, we’ve discovered that many of the problems are related to simple neglect. Processes were defined years ago, in some cases. Those processes became a part of the culture. Those processes became the ultimate objective of those employees executing the processes and those managing the processes. There was no innovation. There was no optimization. The status quo became acceptable… then it became the unquestioned practice. In one case, IT systems were built around these status quo processes, which further entrenched the existing processes and the people who executed the processes. Meanwhile, the business suffered. Cycle times remained the same. The business could not improve because of culture… because of the poorly automated processes… because of the uninspired workforce.
We’ve been working on a way to organize and codify process improvement initiatives that allows the businesses to manage their processes in groups, or portfolios, in ways that give senior and mid-level managers ways to optimize segments of their businesses at a time. More to come.
So… I’ve been busy…
October 17th, 2006i’m hoping to resurrect my blog. I’ve not been blogging since WPC in Boston. Lots of reasons. Whatever. Clients have dragged us in some interesting directions over the summer, and I’m hoping to write about, and codify, the project we’ve been working on.
A Refreshing Voice…
July 13th, 2006I went to the final key note today by Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s new COO from Walmart. He’s good. He’s very good. He doesn’t spew the same product-focused, ’sell more licenses’ message to the partners that I’ve heard so much of in the last few days. Really, I can’t believe that the messaging from Microsoft and the language that their employees use is so product centric.
Kevin says that he’s pushing Microsoft to be more solution focused. While I’ve heard Microsoft people say this before, I actually believed him. He only mentioned licensing as a part of Microsoft’s goals for the next year. He didn’t make me feel like that’s the only thing he wanted me to talk about with my customers. All the keynotes have referenced the people ready strategy. Kevin’s the first one I believed actually understood what people ready means from a Microsoft perspective. I think he gets how this stuff needs to work because he’s been a consumer of Microsoft solutions. He’s not baked into the product focus of the Microsoft Way. He’s a guy who seems like he knows how to sell stuff to folks… both inside Microsoft, to customers, and to customers.
I also have a lot of respect for a guy who takes such a clear stand, in a very bold way, about their competitive stance against Google. His quote, as I wrote it down, is ‘we’re gonna go after Google. You heard me right. We’re going after Google…. We’re not gonna let them take food off our plate and that’s what they’re attempting to do.’ Awesome. At some level, I like the stuff that Google’s doing. At some level, I don’t really care who wins this battle. And at some level, I have a firm belief that Google’s got a legitimate place in the consumer space. I will tell you that I’m excited about a guy who is competitive, states his position so clearly, and so obviously believes it.
Innovating at Microsoft…
July 13th, 2006Kevin Turner in his keynote talked about Microsoft’s R&D investment and how that correlates to their level of innovation. In an era when Google is equivalent to IBM in market cap Microsoft still leads in the application of cash to R&D. Now, I’ve read studies that question how closely R&D should be looked at relative to the marketable, revenue-producing product that are produced. Regardless, Kevin said that the Microsoft R&D budget is ranked number 1 at $6.2B. And, last year, Microsoft secured over 3000 patents. I’m sure that IBM produces more. I’d even suspect that TI produces more than that. Perhaps Microsoft isn’t the most efficient at deploying its R&D capital, but they are committed to being in the game and they are putting their money where their mouth is. Gotta like that.
Another point, as a partner, why wouldn’t I want to be associated with an organization that is investing like that. Doesn’t that only benefit me!?!
