Business Transformation in Action

If Big Data is the Problem, Then Hadoop May be the Answer

2011-09-20T20:37:02Z

Big Data may be the problem, but Hadoop is the answer. Hadoop is an open-source software framework that enables applications to run across large arrays of nodes, accessing petabytes' worth of data.

It was originally created by Doug Cutting to support the open-source Nutch search engine project, which is now part of the Apache Lucene text-search library. 'Hadoop' was actually named after Cutting's son's toy elephant - a fitting analogy for the Big Data challenges that lie ahead.

This fall, I have the privilege of moderating a series of Webcasts, called "Hadoop Tuesdays," on the phenomenon sweeping the data management space known as "Hadoop."

The first session is on Tuesday, September 27th (commencing 1.00 pm Eastern, 10.00 am Pacific) with a chat with James Kobielus, data management guru from Forrester Research, to learn what Hadoop is and why it's so important to enterprises today. The event is co-sponsored by Informatica and Cloudera.

As Jim put it in a recent post, "Hadoop is vendor-agnostic in-database analytics in the cloud, leveraging an open, comprehensive, extensible framework for building complex advanced analytics and data management functions for deployment into cloud computing architectures."

He adds that "Hadoop has already proven its initial footprint in the enterprise data warehousing (EDW) arena: as a petabyte-scalable staging cloud for unstructured content and embedded execution of advanced analytics." This is where Hadoop is proving its mettle, he adds.

These days, any organization contemplating a Big Data strategy -- one that will deliver value through greatly enhanced analytical capabilities -- needs to look at Hadoop.

Cloud: Proceed with Caution

2011-08-28T04:58:21Z

As part of my work and investigation on the possibilities of deploying enterprise content management in the cloud, I heard from Curt Finch, CEO of Journyx, a project management software vendor, on things companies need to know about cloud deployments.

For more details on the cloudification of ECM, see my two-part series published here at TechTarget's ebizQ site. Part 1 surveys the cloud ECM landcape, and in Part 2, I speak with leading analysts.

Q: Is cloud-based ECM something that organizations are already doing?

Curt Finch: Yes, but mostly this is true with startups or VC backed firms. Some B2C operations, like restaurants, have their web page on Facebook now instead of having their own site.

Q: Will some ECM services be leveraged through public clouds, or is this mainly a private cloud play?

Finch: It's possible but the only advantage I can see is if you expect massive peak load spikes, like with the Superbowl or something like a natural disaster.

Q: Are there security implications to public or private ECM adoption -- or regulatory barriers?

Finch: If you trust the cloud vendor -- such as Amazon -- then there aren't really any security implications. But do you know for sure you can trust the cloud vendor?

Q: Will content remain on local systems, or will that also be moved to the cloud?

Finch: It would seem sensible to either move all of it or none at all.

Q: Does cloud offer the possibility for more widespread ECM adoption?

Finch: Perhaps. Complex systems are better managed by their writers, like Vignette.

Q: Will it truly put the "E" in ECM?

Finch: It's doubtful. The cultural and organizational impediments won't change, will they?

Q: What aspects of ECM are more likely to see cloud adoption -- records management, digital asset management, workflow documents or others?

Finch: I believe it will be public web site management and document management.

Q: Are there areas of ECM that are not as well-suited for the cloud?

Finch: Data that is encumbered by regulatory compliance such as HIPAA or the financial industry.

Q: Does cloud ECM change the way content management is governed?

Finch: It lessens the involvement of intransigent IT managers -- as they are often viewed by executives.

'Design is... Everywhere!'

2011-08-16T02:32:59Z

Management guru Tom Peters, in his most recent work, The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, talks about the importance of design as a part of continuous improvement.

The important thing is that design is not just something that shows up in a product at the end of the production process -- it's something that should be thoroughly baked into the organization.

As Peters points out:

"Design is Sony... in everything they do.
"Design is Apple... in everything they do.
:Design is BMW.. in everything they do.
"Design is Starbucks.... in everything they do."

You get the picture -- design needs to be everywhere, Peters says. He provides several guidelines for becoming design centric:

"Every project has a formal 'design advocate."
"Everyone is encouraged through example to become design minded."
"Design is always considered on five dimensions: 1) usability; 2) simplicity; 3) aesthetics; 4) 'Cool,' 'Wow,' 'Gaspworthy,' and 5) Excellence."
"Every workspace is a living example of Exvellence in design -- it 'sings our song.""Design reviews are part of all project reviews."

Cloud-Based Content Management is Here Today: View from the Trenches

2011-08-08T22:21:37Z

In recent weeks, I have been doing some work and investigation on the possibilities of deploying enterprise content management in the cloud. As part of this project, I heard from Seth Earley, president and CEO of Earley & Associates, who is in the trenches in the movement toward cloud-based ECM.

For more details on the cloudification of ECM, see my two-part series published here at TechTarget's ebizQ site. Part 1 surveys the cloud ECM landcape, and in Part 2, I speak with leading analysts.

Earley says using hosted ECM applications makes sense for organizations of all sizes for a number of the same reasons as with other types of enterprise applications. "There is less system management overhead, lower initial cost in terms of software acquisition and licensing fees, costs are more predictable and systems can be quickly deployed," he points out. Also, capacity is on demand and easily scalable, he adds.

Cloud-based ECM is already something that organizations are doing, Earley adds. "Many organizations are using content management and document management systems that are hosted by application service providers." He points to Microsoft's "BPOS" hosted SharePoint service, which is "becoming a viable deployment option - especially for small and midsized organizations." Other software vendors have offered hosted options for a number of years as well, he adds.

Earley expects the ECM function to see the most widespread cloud adoption is that of digital asset management. "Many internal and external groups collaborate around DAM -- such as advertising and creative agencies with clients," he explains. "This user demographic is typically less technical, and creative agencies and their clients typically do not have developer resources available and need to rely on an IT organization. Cloud based ECM can be a faster, less costly option for them."

Will some ECM services be leveraged through public clouds, or is this mainly a private cloud play? Expect all of the above, says Earley: "There are a variety of options as well as some interpretation of terminology. A private cloud implies 1. Computer resources are dedicated to a specific organization 2. Those resources are available as on demand, self service provisioning 3. Computing resources are shared across applications and users." However, he adds, "private clouds also entail higher levels of security and typically run on a virtual private network - which is a network that requires specialized software and encryption to ensure high levels of security."

And, he observes, there are security implications to public or private ECM adoption. "Many organizations do not trust their data to be residing on publicly accessible platforms or to share tenancy with other applications, users or organizations," he points out. "They would need to have great faith in the providers security protocols and human safeguards. Highly sensitive, competitive, or regulated information environments would not be good candidates for public cloud ECM options."

Will some content remain on local systems, then, even within cloud environments? "In most cases, cloud computing implies no local content," says Earley. "However, many systems provide offline content synchronization so that users can access content when disconnected. Since most people have access almost anywhere, this function is less essential. It also adds complexity and overhead to a deployment."

Plus, Earley says, it will be a while before there is a uniform type of ECM approach across entire enterprises -- the "E" in ECM. As he puts it: "Enterprise content management is a concept and a bit of a marketing construct. There are no truly integrated ECM platforms that will handle all aspects of all content from email management to records management, workflow management, web content management, document management, collaboration, blogs, wikis, learning management, learning content management, component authoring, digital asset management, or intranet management."

ECM suites, he adds, tend to be "loosely integrated modules that are usually developed by different resources -- development groups or companies -- and then assembled by a vendor."

IBM's Ken Bisconti on Enterprise Content Management's Push into the Cloud

2011-07-19T23:48:22Z

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Ken Bisconti, vice president of ECM Products and Strategy for IBM, about the changing face of ECM.

For more details on the cloudification of ECM, see my two-part series published here at TechTarget's ebizQ site. Part 1 is up, and Part 2 is scheduled for later this month.

Q: Is cloud-based ECM still visionary, or now a practical approach?

Bisconti: I think it's more than visionary; I think it is viewed as something that can be implemented immediately. But most of the time, clients are starting first with a business problem that they're trying to solve.

What I generally find is that cloud computing is a reality today, but it is not the first question that should be asked. The first questions are what business problem am I trying to solve, and what solutions are available to solve it?

Q: What are some business problems to which cloud offers an answer?

Bisconti: Am I trying to digitize physical records information to save money, or do I have a business process like policy and claims management, or contract management, or invoice processing that I'm trying to automate and optimize?' 'Or do I have a business problem where I need to provide lifecycle governance and retention management, and e-discovery on my content? Or how do I better discover and find information across my organization?"

Q: How do businesses begin to evaluate a cloud ECM approach?

Bisconti: First, what's the business problem they're trying to solve? As we get into the discussion, then the deployment modality comes into play. Often, the cloud discussion starts either from a line-of-business leader who is looking for more efficient ways to get started, or respond to an opportunity without getting in line on IT's to-do list.

Q: What are the ROI or business benefits of moving to the cloud?

Typically, ROI tends to be around both improved operations, and reduced upfront costs or capital expenditures, which also is tied to being able to scale the cost in line with the value derived. In traditional on-premise environments, sometimes there's a significant upfront cost to get that infrastructure up in place, incurred before you have your first user using the application.

In terms of improved operations, generally it is expected that infrastructure testing and SaaS are expected to cost less than traditional outsourced services by 30-60%. And the majority of customers also believe cloud will also drive down the cost of running applications, especially those that are well-defined and repeatable.

Q: Where is cloud ECM not as suitable?

Bisconti: In a cloud computing model, even though in the long run it might cost you more than a well-managed on-premise environment, the cost is more in line with usage. We have also found less immediate interest in cloud for highly customized applications, and highly customized business processes -- especially those that might have integration with internal application systems and ERP applications. There has been hesitancy to use cloud computing in highly regulated and sensitive data environments.

Q: What types of cloud deployments are you seeing?

Bisconti: There's a spectrum of different kinds of cloud computing, ranging from SaaS-type models, to platform as service, infrastructure as service, process as service, to different types of computing or cloud models. When it comes to ECM, we primarily find that there are use cases that include SaaS-type models of simple content sharing in applications like IBM's Lotus Live cloud service, which is a public cloud SaaS. We also see use cases where organizations are loking for horizontal use cases, with maybe a little more value lije information lifecycle governance, archiving records management and discovery. Often that is in hosted private cloud type of operations.

Q: Does IBM now have cloud-based offerings for ECM?

Bisconti: We definitely do. In general, it is an emerging trend, I wouldn't say that we've seen a majority of our business moving to cloud;, its still a majority doing on-premise deployments.

10 Radical Rules of Business Transformation in Action

2011-07-07T22:37:07Z

Readers of this blogsite may notice that we've changed the name from "SOA in Action" to "Business Transformation in Action."

The change reflects the evolution of the ebizQ site from coverage of a collection of the leading technology initiatives to focus on that which is having the most direct impact on the business: Business Process Management, or BPM.

For great discussions and all the latest news on developments in Service Oriented Architecture, be sure to visit ebizQ's sister site, SearchSOA.com.

Here at this site, we will be exploring the forces that are transforming the way we do business. We will be exploring and urging and cheering -- and cheering as loud as we can -- for transformations such as the following:

From calcified to continuously improving
From commanded-and-controlled to collaborative
From hidebound to human centric
From enterprisey to entrepreneurial
From closed system to customer-directed
From siloed to service-oriented
From sheltered to situationally aware
From structured to synergistic
From error-prone to elegant
From angst-ridden to agile

BPM and the CIO's Dilemma

2011-06-29T05:01:02Z

Mike Gammage took a close look at IBM's latest study of 3,000 CIOs from around the world and noticed something about their commitment to business process management: It's not as strong as it was before -- down by four percentage points.

A statistical fluke? Often, variations in data from year to year need to exceed at least five percentage points or so to be considered a statistically significant change. Or is there something else afoot? CIOs are actually heavily committed to process improvements, Mike observes:

"In leading organizations 99% of CIOs say they would personally lead initiatives to simplify process. So process is on pretty much every CIO's agenda, and in many cases it's even a personal involvement. And yet - the study reports that CIOs do not see Business Process Management as their highest priority. In fact, BPM has slipped back as a priority - from 64% to 60% - since the last CIO Study in 2009. Which doesn't seem to stack up - unless you read it as a sign of how canny CIOs can be."

Canniness indeed. What's at issue, Mike says, is the business isn't buying into IT's version of BPM -- it often will simply go its own way, with its own tools, such as Visio.

Once again, we see examples of the disconnect between IT and the business -- as well as between the IT and the BPM teams in action. BPM has to be brought home to solving real business problems, not throwing a bunch of technology over the wall and hoping it will help somebody. As Mike puts it: "The breakthrough comes when BPM is extended to become an holistic view of the enterprise, not just what's automated."

So true, so true.

BPM and SOA Roundup: Cloudy BPM, Social Business, Single-Purpose Apps

2011-06-21T15:13:58Z

Does Software as a Service and business process management belong together? That's the question asked by ebizQ contributor Alan Earls. Alan reports that leading analysts are positive about the concept of SaaS-delivered BPM -- but cautious: Consider what Forrester Research's Clay Richardson had to say: He still sees a lot of concern about risk and perceived risk, adding that most of the SaaS BPM activity he has seen is "try before you buy"--that is, situations in which companies are leveraging SaaS as a set of training wheels. "After that testing period, most companies still seem to want to bring BPM in house," he says.

Speaking of BPM in the clouds, Michael Dortch also had some substantive things to say on the topic in his latest post, especially as it relates to intellectual property concerns and Apple's new iCloud offering. "Even if iCloud use in business rises no further than the penetration of Macintosh computers in most offices, iCloud will likely raise both use and perception of cloud-based services designed to help businesspeople to share information. Including documents. Including sometimes sensitive documents. Such as those that contain critical intellectual property. Including but definitely not limited to business processes. So what's a process-minded, security-conscious businessperson to do?".

The ebizQ site has also been packed with commentary on evolving business needs. Dion Hinchcliffe discusses what CIOs and IT managers need to know about emerging social businesses. "The CIO of today tends to be one more focused on the business and less on technology than in years past. Whether they're an activist CIO pushing for change or more concerned about the status quo, the consensus at the moment is that the role is first and foremost grounded in the business."

Scott Menter says it's time to "drive a stake through the heart of single-purpose apps." He says too many applications have their own workflow, training requirements, servers, vendor overhead, databases, extension languages. "BPM opens the possibility of leveraging a single app to solve dozens of business challenges. Imagine, if you will, replacing all those single-purpose tools with one flexible platform. From one vendor. Requiring one skillset. Enticing, is it not?"

Crowdsourcing: Bringing Thousands of New Ideas into the Process

2011-06-01T02:36:23Z

Forrester's Clay Richardson just published a piece at the ebizQ site that connects the dots between business process management and crowdsourcing. As he points out, there are profound benefits that can come out of a well-organized crowdsourcing process: the internal social network alone "presents a treasure trove of influence," and he urges business process professionals to "must integrate social network analysis techniques into their process improvement efforts." Crowdsourced guidance can become the key enabler for agile response and process-exception handling, he adds.

What is crowdsourcing, and how do you bake it into your day-to-day operations? Crowdsourcing is a process that looks to broader communities -- both inside and outside the organization -- to tackle vexing business problems. Often, there's an incentive offered to provide motivation.

Consider some interesting examples of organizations employing crowdsourcing:

Organizers of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers) report that more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland.The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. OCR readers miss a lot of content. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.

At GE Research, 85 employees bought and sold "stock" in 62 new product ideas. The project with the greatest value at the end of this prediction-market experiment would receive $50,000 in research funding.

The Oil Spill Recovery Institute, established by Congress after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, issued a $20,000 challenge to a network of 175,000 "solvers" from 200 countries around the world to come up with a solution for cleaning up Prince William Sound. After three months, a construction engineer from the Midwest came up with the winning answer that solved the problem.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has turned to crowdsourcing in a big way. Recently, the space agency awarded a retired engineer in an online competition seeking formulas for predicting solar flares. Close to 600 people examined the challenge, five submitted entries, and the winner of the $30,000 incentive, a retired radio frequency engineer, developed a solution that allows for a 24-hour forecast window of solar flare event onset with 75 percent accuracy.

Architects' Advice: 'Be Clear, Be Simple, Be Valuable'

2011-05-28T02:56:23Z

"Be Clear, Be Simple, Be Valuable."

That's the advice Chris Lockhart provides, as he walks readers of his latest post through an exercise in discovering and documenting end-user requirements.

The bottom line, Lockhart says, it that business users don't care one bit about technology being employed. They want whatever delivers results. Can you explain what you can do for them in a single tweet?

"We begin by speaking in conceptual terms. We speak in terms of capabilities. What is it that we, as IT, need to be able to do, at a high level, in order to fix this problem? Forget cost. That comes later. Forget vendors. That comes last. Give me a sentence, in 140 characters, that describes the means by which we succeed. If you can't, I submit you're ill equipped to be in the business of architecture."

Solutions and architectures need to start with capabilities, Lockhart points out. "They must be capability based. They must be informative without clobbering our customers with unnecessary details."

Simplicity is golden.

IDC: Booming Times for BPM and Middleware Market

2011-05-27T02:32:01Z

IDC just released some data that shows that the worldwide business process management (BPM) and middleware market recovered strongly from its 2009 growth slump and for 2010 revenue totaled nearly $16.1 billion, representing growth of 9.2% - up sharply from a growth rate of 2.2% in 2009.

Of the two main components of the market, application server middleware grew the fastest at 10.8% while integration and process automation middleware grew 8.2%.

IDC also pins IBM as the largest vendor in this market, followed by Oracle at a distant second. Microsoft is third, less than one third the size of Oracle. At 20% growth in 2010, Microsoft was the fastest-growing large BPM and middleware vendor.

No Governance, No Security: Simple as That

2011-05-27T01:37:48Z

I recently had the opportunity to provide some of my thoughts to Alan Earls' latest article on the challenges of cloud computing security at SearchSOA.

The bottom line, he relates, is that security is a big issue for cloud computing, and the only effective way to deliver security in the cloud is through good governance.

Alan quotes Daryl Plummer, Gartner analyst and leading thinker in the SOA space, who says gateways -- which provide security, management, encryption, and identity management for services -- take on a new role in cloud security management. The challenge is that policies must now be federated across multiple services and across multiple gateways, he says.
.

David Linthicum, analyst at the Bick Group, says governance fits hand in glove with security. "Governance provides the policies around services so that they are only allowed to perform actions that are in a range and if it is out of range they are disallowed and it is reported to somebody," he says.

Want Process Improvement? Be Obsessive. Be Very Obsessive.

2011-05-24T22:30:34Z

No business process succeeds if it is implemented in a dry, passionless way.

I'm reading Tom Peters' most recent work, The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, and there are plenty of common-sense, yet under-appreciated lessons for anyone who seeks significant process improvement within their organizations.

Peters' message is -- as it has been since he co-authored In Search of Excellence back in the 1980s -- process needs to be simple, real, and most of all, focused obsessively on the customer.

Here are a few nuggets:

MBWA: More than anything, Peters is a zealot about "Management By Wandering Around," or MBWA. No matter how much technology we have, nothing beats managers getting out of their offices and into the trenches to listen to and engage with their employees.

Big Plan? No, Small Steps: "Dive in and try and try and adjust and try again and plagiarize from extant experiments, until you're blue in the face."

The 1 Percent Drill: Clearing Away a World of 'Slop' in Just 45 minutes: "Any operation at any time can cut 1 percent of its budget."

Master "milestoning": "Milestones are all-important, no matter how trivial or repetitive the task."

Design is... Everywhere: "Design becmes part of every project, tiny to grand, in every department.... Design excellence applies to every business process as much as every product."

Break the rules: "Drop the 'rational analysis.' Skip the 'balance' argument! Cut to the chase! Every person who makes it into the history books is by definition 'insanely disobedient.' He or she doesn't 'buy the act.' Love 'best practices' if they are 'cool stuff' from a jillion different disparate sources inside and outside the company and the industry, available for each of us to learn from. I hate 'best practices' when mimicry is demanded."

An organization is 'people serving people.' (Period!): "Enterprise at it's best is an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that maximizes individuals' growth and elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others." Imagine the opposite, Peters says.

Thoughts on the ROI of BPM

2011-05-24T02:24:06Z

How do you measure return on investment for BPM investments?

Gartner analyst Bill Rosser recently took a stab at the ROI for BPM initiatives -- a tough area to measure ROI, since BPM has so many components and involves so many areas of the business. And from what he's seen, BPM is showing promising paybacks.

A copy of the Gartner analysis is available from the Appian Website. The bottom line, Rosser reports, is that measuring ROI for BPM should follow the same way other initiatives get measured:

"Determining the ROI for BPM project investments in general follows the traditional approach -- that is, the evaluation of the benefits delivered versus the costs incurred. What may be different about ROI for BPM is that BPM is targeted exclusively at improving business performance -- in terms that make clear sense to the business community."

Gartner surveys have shown that "78% of the respondents carrying out 154 BPM projects had return rates better than 15%, that 55% had returns in the $100,000 to $500,000 range, and that 67% of the projects were completed in less than six months."

Measurable returns seen from BPM typically include diminished costs, better speed, higher quality, or increased customer satisfaction, "which results in greater retention or loyalty, and, thus, higher revenue and gross margin currency."

Cost areas for BPM includes consulting, software licenses, and staff labor spent on planning, modeling, analysis, development, change management, communications, and building a longer-term capability, such as the start of a business process competency center.

A major challenge with measuring BPM's ROI is trying to determine if business improvements were a direct result of the BPM effort, or if other factors were in play. Plus, Rosser adds, "doing too much and spending too much time on refining estimates that, in the end, will not improve the quality of the investment decision."

BPM is a Process, Too

2011-05-23T15:39:57Z

Getting started with business process management requires BPM principles right from the get-go.

Miguel Valdes-Faura, CEO of BonitaSoft and co-founder ot the open source Bonita project, provides some fundamental guidelines for getting started:

Model the reality, not the ideal: Watch how employees do things before attempting to map out a workflow. "Identify a benchmark for how people currently perform a given function at an optimal level of output and fix a model of that -- you can do this graphically, though it can also be done in a simple document."

Start small, but with something of value: "Start with simple, visible, low-risk internal projects before moving on to increasingly critical processes. However, the first implementation should be one in which real improvement actually makes a difference to the organization. No one will be impressed if the first application of BPM results in 'improvements' like better handling of useless, unnecessary, or truly unimportant tasks."

Encourage IT-business collaboration: "Encourage as much collaboration as possible between developers and end-users throughout the deployment process. IT can invest a lot of time developing the 'perfect' BPM application, but unless the end-users who will be employing the process in their actual work become involved, there's no guarantee that the two sides will ultimately sync up."

Valdes-Faura reminds us that just as every type of organization is different, they will always put their own stamp on their BPM efforts. But whatever it looks like, it's a worthwhile effort.