10.17.08
Posted in Business Intelligence, Cloud, SOA & Web Services, Technology Market Trends at 2:24 pm by Tony Baer
Anybody looking for the tea leaves in how the IT industry is facing an uncertain economy that has now finally been given the R word will be disappointed by scanning the latest quarterlies from IT giants. While Oracle and IBM reported 20% gains, SAP was down.
A simplistic answer is that the winners – if one can actually use that term in a period officially termed a recession – may be services that help customers improve their elasticity in changing cycles, as opposed to software providers, where the bounds of a project are more firmly determined by the scope of the software. You just partially implement an SAP upgrade. But according to Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus, tough times favor application of business intelligence, and of course, few customers are likely to pull their maintenance contracts.
Of course, all this blurs the contribution of open source, the emergence of SaaS and, as independent consultant David Linthicum points to, the cloud, and surprisingly, after all the negative hype, the SOAS market.
This was all part of a broader discussion convened last week by Dana Gardner on the impacts of the recession on IT. Click here for a transcript, and here to download the MP3.
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10.02.08
Posted in Enterprise Applications, IT Services & Systems Integration, Web 2.0 Apps at 11:52 am by Tony Baer
The Y2K issue a decade ago brought to light a critical problem facing many organizations: what happens when your most experienced minds retire? That’s especially critical in the case of skillsets for technologies, architectures, or methodologies that are no longer in vogue. That brought forth the idea that, if you can’t prevent the passage of time, there might as well be some way to harvest the experience gained from it.
The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants. The problem we had with classical Knowledge Management was that the whole idea seemed too difficult to put boundaries around: Just where exactly do you draw the lines on a knowledge management project? Even ERP projects, which were notable for their cost overruns, had more tangible targets: implement a new transaction system that, in many cases, would require reengineering of business processes. And we know how well contained those projects ended up.
Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.
A couple days ago Xerox researcher (and of course blogger) Venkatesh G. Rao wrote about Social Media and Knowledge management as a generational war. He spoke of several occasions where he was asked to give token advice to knowledge management project leads or consultants with the idea of finding a middle ground to update knowledge management practices and make them more webby and agile. We thought he got kind of carried away with the generational argument that was rife with stereotypes. Sure, in all likelihood, Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.
We’re more in agreement with another facet of his argument, that conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process, whereas social media tends to be more agile. It’s very much analogous to the different methodologies of software development, not to mention the idea of top-down vs. bottom-up.
Conventional knowledge management initiatives tend to be top-down affairs, driven by plenty of advanced planning for designating experts and thought leaders, then harvesting or codifying their insights, developing applications and databases, and inputting this all. By contrast, the social media are designed for use when the muse hits. It might not be comprehensive, but it provides a fast outlet that, through processes such as folksonomies applies a Wikipedia-like grassroots approach to classifying or giving meaning to knowledge, and easy-to-use technologies employing liberal use of tagging that help insight originators to just get their thoughts down in a manner that makes it retrievable, at the point when they have the time (or not) to contribute it.
The battle is more about whether learning is a more bottom-up rather than top-down exercise. There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it. The idea that the debate between knowledge management and social media is a generational divide is hogwash.
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