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Taxonomy: It sits in the critical path of …

June 9, 2008

Where is the excitement around this issue?

It seems that “Taxonomy” was my word for the week. This is my third post about it within 7 days. It’s not that I am in love with the word, rather, it’s just pretty darn important! With any big initiative, the first thing we look to is a solid foundation for communication. Think about it, we usually address taxonomy anywhere from casual discussions to formal governance groups for many initiatives – dare I say any initiative that strives to bring real change to an organization begins with taxonomy (either consciously or subconsciously). Thinking it through, here are some of my top-of-mind game changers that require a solid taxonomy:

• Master data management. By definition this is really an enterprise taxonomy that is the official reference data for an organization.
• Metadata management. Tagging data with information is best performed only after a taxonomy is well-established. Else, with-what-shall-I-tag-it plagues the process.
• Business Intelligence. Without a proper taxonomy, how do we bring together people from diverse business perspectives together to understand data from a central and enterprise viewpoint?
• Data Management. Well, of course we can’t properly manage data without knowing where things are in a hierarchy or what context the data should exist in.
• Data Quality. Here we are really measuring data against the taxonomy; whether implicit or explicit.
• Governance. Strategic decisions are made for specific purposes and they need to rely and depend upon a socialized and accepted taxonomy.
• Data Stewardship. This is the process of holding someone accountable for making tactical decisions to implement strategic direction.
• BPM. When we look to manage business processes, they depend upon real information. So, having a taxonomy to base these data points is crucial.
• SOA. Reusing software components and exposing them at the enterprise level demands a highly accepted understanding of the organizations data. Sure, this view is exposed as a group of web services that are published in a repository that is self aware – but without a canonical data model as your underlying foundation, consistency is not reached. A canonical data model is highly correlated to a mature taxonomy.
• Strategy, Solutions and Architecture. It’s near impossible to calibrate these three without a friction free flow of communication. Let’s not talk about what should’a, could’a and would’a – but let’s focus on the business problem at hand. Having a living taxonomy that is socialized, accepted and part of our DNA is key to gaining quick momentum as we put distance between us and our competition.

These are just some quickies that I bubbled up. What other initiatives need a solid taxonomy? Thinking about taxonomy, when you look to bring real change to an organization, what happens? From my experience, there are two choices:

1. Address taxonomy early and often. Realize that there are some things that are so important that we need to establish, socialize and enforce them.
-OR-
2. Jump to build a solution. Then realizing there are terms misaligned, misused and duplicated, go back and either fix the data models (and all subsequent diagrams and code – this rarely gets done) or create a lot of code to hide these issues. When we do this, we establish a short term brittle foundation that breaks when the next change comes or we end up with a bunch of custom spaghetti that tries to tie things together but really ends with just a lot of confusion.

Bottom line
• Embrace taxonomy within your natural collaboration style. When something is unclear, pause, ask, record, check for understanding, agree on the outcome and move forward. It’s not a development phase, don’t sell it to senior management. No one cares about it. It’s an expected minimum of doing business. Add it to your culture’s DNA.
• Don’t underestimate the issues when terms are not aligned. It wrecks havoc to your foundational infrastructure and the costs (both hard and soft) can be big. Know it is there and plan for it.
• Scope your risk. If you are working within a group or team, the risk is small. Plan for it and cross it off your list as you develop it. However, if you are aligning silos or working across divisions or bringing others into alignment, or working cross-culturally, or introducing new teams, these issues can be big. Again, plan for it – put someone in charge of its care and feeding.
• Use it as a way to create excitement and ownership. Once you work together, it is always good to look for accomplishments to celebrate. Depending upon your scope, it can also be a way to generate a new level of buy-in. Manage the group right and they walk away with the justified feeling that they had part in it – that they created it and it reflects their slice of the business. Trust me here – then they will socialize it and ensure that its followed in their domain!

Now that is exciting stuff!

~ Scott Felten

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Enterprise 2.0 and Governance

June 8, 2008

Prof. Andrew McAfee (see my previous post) in a blog post in Nov 2006 asked his readers to consider this: Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle “keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum,” the other of which is guided by the rule “make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others’ expertise.”  Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles.  Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account.  Which of these two comes out ahead over time? 

My guess would be the latter.

So, what is Governance?

In simple terms I’d say that Governance is the set of policies, procedures and structures you define and establish in an organization to guide and direct the use of technology to achieve organizational goals. So it is about both IT and the business.

Many people think governance is about control and limiting the power of the user. On the contrary I think that good governance actually enables better collaboration - the more clearly the terms of use and the collaboration structures and mechanisms are defined, the easier it becomes to navigate the world of unstructured content. To me, governance is like the banks of a river - without the banks the river waters could cause enormous destruction and would spread out and be wasted. The banks provide direction and enable the river waters to be channeled and to achieve useful purposes.

In the Enterprise 2.0 context, one finds that companies are concerned when it comes to allowing the use of such technologies across the firewall. The typical concerns are around monitoring the content posted in blogs and wikis, fears over potential lawsuits emanating from the publication of information that is slanderous in nature or hate-oriented or which can be interpreted as being harassing or discriminatory in any shape or form. There is also concern around the potential for trade secrets, new product information, R&D information and other such inside information getting out. At the client I am at currently, there is tremendous concern over the possibility of allowing for collaboration between internal employees and any external entities.

I wonder if the very same concerns existed when email was first introduced or way back when the telephone was first made available in a business setting.

Most companies tend to have an information security policy and that seems to have generally sufficed to handle these concerns around email and phone calls. In a similar fashion, I think it’d be useful to extend that information security policy to cover Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, social networking, etc. It’d also be useful to highlight and publicize these policies so that employees are aware that instant messages or blog or wiki posts or comments on a discussion thread are to be treated as public communication. Also, one needs to consider that typically online, social communities tend to be self-policing and self-correcting.

So I would like to suggest that for a company to successfully embrace Enterprise 2.0, it should first decide how it wants to handle the content that will be generated through the use of such technologies. Would it not be reasonable to assume that all such information should be treated as the company’s digital assets?

So when it comes to providing governance around your Enterprise 2.0 solution, it might be useful to look at the following areas:
* Findability - how can you make it easy to find relevant content so users do not have to remember URLs or content locations? What can you do to provide true enterprise search capabilities? Can the search experience be customized?
* Retention - how long should content be retained both from a legal perspective and because of the business necessity to find older content? How about a mechanism to archive content that isn’t being actively used?
* Versioning - how many versions of content would you like to support? Make it easy to go back to a previous version but manage this effectively to minimize storage costs. Can you enforce storage quotas?
* Information Architecture - what guidelines do you want to provide around navigation and search? What kind of metadata do you want captured with different kinds of content to make it easy to find pertinent information? Do you have specific thoughts around taxonomy? Also, would you want to use workflows to manage document state? How about content approval policies? How do you integrate the content in the collaboration system with your enterprise portals?
* Customization - is the system customizable and does it provide the ability to turn functionality on/off as needed? What kinds of user customization of the system would be acceptable? How do you plan to verify that those customizations are safe to be deployed to your Production environment? Will there be a rollback mechanism?
* Security - provide adequate security so that content that needs special security can be effectively protected. Also verify that there are adequate mechanisms to audit and report system usage, and enforce information management policies such as retention, auditing, expiration, etc.
* The terms of use - define what terms govern the use of your system.
* Acceptable content - state upfront what kinds of content are acceptable i.e. regarding text, images, videos, audio, etc. Also specify your policy around sharing this content externally.
* Integration of such systems into the organization’s Enterprise Content Management system - How do you envision the information flowing from the location that provides free collaboration to your enterprise content management system? How do you plan to handle e-discovery? Where should the final, legal record of content reside?
* Tools - finally, evaluate the available Enterprise 2.0 tools to see which one best meets your needs in light of the requirements outlined above.
* Documentation - document your policies and procedures and the custom framework you are going to implement with respect to the software tool(s) selected above and publicize its availability.

To exercise the system, a pilot rollout could be considered and the guidelines and policies then be tweaked appropriately based on relevant feedback. But after that, IT should get out of the way and strive to effectively enable and empower the business to use these Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

One other thing I think companies should focus on is identifying and establishing the process for maintaining a single version of the truth when it comes to content management. Having multiple redundant versions of the same content for example in email, the user’s pc, a shared network folder, a collaboration space and a content management system is not a good idea not only in terms of governance and compliance but also very expensive when you think of backup and storage costs and not to mention the amount of time lost in finding out which is the latest version or the single version of truth. I had a colleague use the term “single point of truth” or SPOT and thinking in terms of SPOT should be a key focus area for governance. In this regard, you could for instance institute a policy that states that internally, email should not be used to forward documents but instead that a link to the document on the intranet or collaboration area be emailed. The same policy could be adopted for external communication as long as an extranet site is available to share content with external collaborators.

Today it is becoming common that the business is beginning to make use of Web 2.0 tools without overt IT involvement. With regard to Web 2.0, this is not as significant an issue since it is mainly about the consumer aspects and geared towards the individual user. However, when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, I do not think that is necessarily the best thing to do long term. For Enterprise 2.0, my recommendation would be that the business work hand-in-hand with IT and make use of a corporate vendor that builds and integrates its Enterprise 2.0 offering with existing infrastructure and has the vision, and proven financial and technical abilities to engineer a solution that can scale well and provide the necessary controls and mechanisms outlined above.

I would like to propose that IT be forward-looking and embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies and strive to empower and enable the business to effectively use such technologies. And I would also propose that the business work in association with IT to achieve its ends instead of pursuing solutions that are good for a single department but may not scale well to the enterprise or are unable to provide the functionality needed long term.

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How is Enterprise 2.0 different from Web 2.0?

June 3, 2008

The term “Enterprise 2.0″ was coined by Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee, during 2006, in an MIT Sloan Management Review article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”, as opposed to Web 2.0 (which was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2004).

When asked “What is Enterprise 2.0?”, the typical response might be “The application of Web 2.0 in the enterprise”. AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management association, states that there is more to Enterprise 2.0 than that. “Web 2.0 is focused on consumer and public-facing Web sites although that distinction was not explicitly made in the original definition.Enterprise 2.0 is much more about businesses’ adoption of “2.0 mindsets” than with the consumer facing side of the coin.” Plus, there is the lack of preciseness around the term Web 2.0.

AIIM defines Enterprise 2.0 as: “A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” (see AIIM Market IQ, Q1 2008, “Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated”, by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen).

A couple of frameworks for Enterprise 2.0 include one from Prof. McAfee, which goes by the mnemonic SLATES (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions and Signals), and another from Dion Hinchcliffe which goes by the mnemonic FLATNESSES (Freeform, Links, Authorship,Tagging, Network-oriented, Extensions, Search,Social, Emergence and Signals).

In similar fashion to AIIM, Forrester Research believes that “the term Web 2.0 has come to embody both consumer and business use of next-generation Web technology but that this lumping together of services is too imprecise to be practical” (see Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013 by G. Oliver Young dated April 21, 2008). Young states that as a result, “most pundits and technology strategists segment the market between consumer Web 2.0 services and business Web 2.0 services.” Forrester thus refers to “the business Web 2.0 market as enterprise Web 2.0, which encompasses Web 2.0 technology and service investments for both externally facing marketing functions and internally facing productivity and collaboration functions.” So for example, Forrester doesn’t include Blogger, Facebook or Twitter as Enterprise 2.0 services even though they are Web 2.0 services.

Forrester believes that “enterprise Web 2.0 technologies represent a fundamentally new way to connect with customers and prospects and to harness the collaborative power of employees.” They specifically refer to Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social networking, mashups, and widgets.

The list of Enterprise 2.0 technologies provided by AIIM is quite similar and consists of mashups, blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social voting/ranking and social bookmarking.

One has to remember though that even if Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as the ones listed above provide for rapid and agile collaboration and empowerment, there has to be a cultural openness to this within an enterprise for it to truly be successful. So it’s not only about aligning the technology with the business, but aligning the culture with the technology that now becomes the challenge.

In future posts, we will take a look at some of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the cultural issues around the adoption of Enterprise 2.0.

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Taxonomy: How can I get one of them?

June 3, 2008

“I’ll have one Taxonomy, a Diet Coke and some fries please!” Today things are fast-paced, sometimes too fast.  Ready, Fire, Aim! is all too common.  However, when building a taxonomy, it needs to simmer for a bit and let all the flavors come together.  We are building something of substance here. So, where do we begin? Here is a little prep work to consider before you begin.

As in anything of substance, look towards your ancestors! Before beginning new journeys, look at the travels and teachings of the ancients. Once upon a time, in a land far far away, things were very expensive and the littlest of changes translated into huge dollars. The ancients lived in those lands and had to navigate through the treacherous waters of high hardware costs, outrageous communication costs, high people costs, massive lines of expensive code and hidden dependencies. In this land, things were new and every notion of business had to be created. In this time, the people who inhabited that land had to use their brains, all the time. There was no drop and drag. There were no visual approaches and pre-established templates. Things had to be thought through in great detail and time was spent on foundational issues…because if we don’t do it right from the beginning, it will be bad, very bad.

So, pull out that old book in your company and turn to that portion that equates to Leviticus – read about your Moses, who came down from the mountain with the law…what was good, what was not. Listen to those stories of old and take stock. It is said that history repeats itself. Why not leverage what’s been done and what’s been done with a rigor that I would say is not the norm of today.

Turn around right now and look at the shelf behind you. There, in the corner, you see it? There’s a book (or two) right there – yes, it’s the 3” black binder that has dust all over it. Take it down, offer a quick thanksgiving and open it slowly. Spend some time with the ancients and understand where you came from – you may just stumble upon truths so great that they make your hair white. At the very least you will walk where the great ones walked and who knows maybe you can point the way to the Promised Land!

You never know where you will find gold – roll up your sleeves and start digging around!

~ Scott Felten

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Taxonomy: When you take the ‘text’ out of ‘Context’, you are left with a ‘Con’!

June 3, 2008

I have a friend who is a true genius. He has a PhD from Harvard University in Organic/Inorganic Chemistry. He also taught there for awhile. He met and married a very intelligent scientist from Mexico and they had three children. They thought that they were going to have developmental problems with their oldest - or at least that is what the doctors told them. You see, their oldest son did not speak right away. As a matter of fact, when their son was 1, then 2 then 3 years old and not speaking - they would take him to the doctors and the prognosis was the same, he was developmentally behind.

Then while he was 3 years old he spoke his first words. His mother told me this way. So, it was lunch time and ‘my son’ turned to me and said…now remember, this was his first words… “Mommy, may I have some lunch please”?  She was shocked and of course very relieved. At the next doctor’s visit, she told the specialist the story. After looking at all the facts, the doctor described things as… Well, you son is very bright and a perfectionist. He was living in a multi-cultural home where both English and Spanish was spoken. Before he chose to communicate (with words), he had to fully understand the framework of grammar and its nuances. Then, he had to work through the process of selecting his base language (will it be English or Spanish).

Fast forwarding the story a few years finds ‘their son’ in first grade. Upon completion of further testing, they found that he was in the top 99.999 percentile in math - among college aged men and women.

This story is not much different than some of the issues we face each day with our clients. More times than not, each team, group, department speaks a different language. I’ll never forget the time where I was asked to develop a strategy for a recognized revenue solution - where they wanted to better align revenue, cost and time to properly manage cash flow and reporting. I was working directly for the CFO and one of the requirements was a report that grouped data as follows, she called it ‘The Region Report’:

  • New Business
  • East Division
  • West Division
  • Canada
  • P&G

The solution was an education on taxonomy. As mature as this company was, they did not operate with a known taxonomy. Much like my friend’s son choosing not to speak until he fully understood what the framework was and how a taxonomy carried made the context known to both sides, I worked to help define the common taxonomy. Once we did this, we were rocking. This application became on of the strongest points in the organization, because we built a foundational canonical model around a true taxonomy that we socialized. This really became the hub of all data points and drove both master data efforts as well as metadata disciplines.

Looking back, it seems obvious and if you did your job well, this should be the case. Can you guess as to the structure in my oversimplified snippet of a real issue?

The above was decomposed to:

  • Country (is a parent of region)
  • Region (belongs to Country and is a parent of SVP)
  • Senior Vice President (works within a Region and is the parent of a VP)
  • Vice President (works for a SVP and owns one or more clients)
  • Client (is owned by one or more (many to many) VPs and has a status of Type)
  • Type (describes the client and consists of either ‘New’ or ‘Established’)

Also, we have the notion of a date for transactions as well as a time-based dimension for SVP, VP, Client and Type - so people, clients and type can reflect ownership movements.

It might seem painful to go through the rigor and discipline of establishing and socializing a true taxonomy, but its worth it. It’s not much different than building a house on solid rock…why rush and build things on sand. Don’t fall for a ‘Con’ - make sure your text resides within the proper context!

Happy Building,

~ Scott

 

 

 

 

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Do you know what’s running?

May 29, 2008

Answer the following questions…How many automated processes are running to support your organization’s operational, tactical, and strategic systems?  When specifically do they run?  Where are they run?  What dependencies exist between them?  Not easy questions to answer given that most organizations will support multiple flavors of systems.  Microsoft, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Mainframe, UNIX, SAP, etc. all have some sort of job scheduler or better phrased workload automation capability.  The problem is most are good at only running processes specific to their own platform or software.

If you support or have supported a system or application (who hasn’t?), keeping track of what processes run throughout the day (or go bump in the night) can be a formidable challenge.  Enter an enterprise workload automation solution.   These solutions help bridge the gap between various systems and infrastructures.

Providing a centralized application that is solely responsible for running required processes (i.e. database backups, journal entry postings, data warehouse loading, system tune-up routines, application health monitoring, etc.), better equips a support team to monitor and respond to events and in some cases become proactive rather than reactive to issues.

Workload automation applications are built to execute workload jobs.  Jobs are basically anything that can be run from a command line prompt.  Dependencies between jobs can be set that can range from simple (Job B runs after Job A) to complex (Job C in Application X runs after Jobs D & E in Application Y and Job F in Application Z).  They often provide functionality that allows for time dependent execution as well.  This allows an application to only run a job during certain times of the day or alert support if a job is running longer than expected.  In the event that a server can only handle a certain amount of workload before become overly taxed, workload automation applications can be configured to only submit a certain number of simultaneous jobs at a given time.

It is not uncommon for organizations to have multiple “calendars” for their systems.  Fiscal days vs. calendar days in the Accounting department for instance.  Workload automation tools allow for custom calendars to be used by applications.  Need to run system maintenance routines on Christmas or 4th of July…setup a holiday calendar.  Need to close the books on the 9th working day of the month, setup a financial closing calendar.

The workload applications are centralized on a workload server.  This provides visibility into what applications affect what servers.  You can also see when they affect them.  If a system needs to be scheduled for service, the workload server can be a good repository to determine when the best “window of opportunity” for the service would be.  All output of job submission and execution is logged on the workload server.  Metadata such as start & stop times, completion states, script output, etc. is available for analysis.  This proves to be an excellent source for understanding system SLA adherence as well as application/job trending for potential future maintenance issues.

All systems run processes “behind the scenes”.  Just because these are invisible to the end-users doesn’t mean they are meant to be forgotten.  A workload automation solution can be a good “one stop shop” for the management of these processes.  Something to consider if you have to go to 5 different places to determine what ran when and where did it fail?

Dave

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Social Networking and SharePoint 2007

May 27, 2008

On May 14, 2008, CIO.com published an article about Understanding Microsoft SharePoint in a Web 2.0 World.

Obviously, Social networking is a significant goal of Web 2.0 and has received a lot of attention over the recent past with the hope of improving worker productivity by making available enhanced online access to people, skills, knowledge and other resources. As Wikipedia says, “Social Networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society”. Social networking software typically allow users to build an online profile through which they can share information about themselves and thus leads to the building of online communities with shared interests and/or activities.

SharePoint 2007 uses the concept of individual, customizable user profiles to provide users with a means of publishing information about themselves. These user profiles can combine information from the organizational directory service such as LDAP or a Human Resource application.

SharePoint provides individual sites (My Sites) for each user that provides personnel information as well as private and public views of content. Visitors to an individual’s My Site can see contact information, presence information, and organizational hierarchy information. My Sites also enables users to display information about their skills, colleagues and other social information.

SharePoint uses the notion of Colleagues, where colleagues can be friends or co-workers or members of the same team, who are related to an individual by means of their profile. The list of colleagues is built by mining multiple sources of information and is directly influenced by the organizational hierarchy. A user can also manually add or remove colleagues from their colleagues web part.

The colleague tracker web part can track changes to the profiles of a users colleagues, for example tracking such things as changes to a blog, new or modified documents, and changes to user profile properties, etc.

The Memberships web part let users see the lists and sites that they are members of.

The In Common With web part shows a visitor summary information relating to memberships, colleagues and managers that the visitor has in common with the owner of that My Site.

The Organization Hierarchy web part on My Profile page shows the user’s manager, peers (others who report to the user’s manager) and any direct reports of that user.

In association with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information is made available that indicates online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information.

The People Search function allows users to find people or skills by means of a search interface that returns search results based on social distance (an ordering of results based on colleague relationships i.e. first your colleagues will appear, then their colleagues and then everyone else).

Microsoft has also provided several Role Based Templates for My Sites to cater to the unique needs and requirements of different roles in an organization.

For more information, see the following white paper from Microsoft: Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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What is Web 2.0?

May 22, 2008

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as “a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” It also quotes Tim O’Reilly (who is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0), as saying that “ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Forrester Research defines Web 2.0 as “a set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.” (from “Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013″ by G. Oliver Young, dated April 21, 2008.)

The phrase Web 2.0 (which really is more of an idea than a software version) has now come to mean the new Web. In an informal sense, Web 2.0 refers to an enhanced form of the world wide web which provides a richer user experience, is more interactive, collaborative, dynamic, participative, and up-to-date. It’s not just about retrieving data anymore but also about creating data and shared knowledge often times in association with others. So users not only download or read but are able to actively upload and create/edit content.

When we speak of Web 2.0, we are speaking about particular technologies and features such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Weblogs (Blogs), wikis, forums, mashups, rich Internet Applications, collaborative or social tagging, podcasting, shared bookmarks, virtual team workspaces, widgets or gadgets, etc. XML, web services, AJAX, etc. are typical building blocks to enable these features of Web 2.0.

And Web 2.0 is big business! In the article quoted above from Forrester, we also read that “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share… In 2008, firms will spend $258 million on social networking tools. After blogs and wikis, mashup technology takes off next, growing from a small base of $39 million in 2007 to $682 million in 2013 — second only to social networking.”

Web 2.0 has already affected social behavior significantly and is beginning to now affect the workplace culture and the ways of doing business. There is enhanced communication because of these technologies and more collaboration between a business, its employees, partners and customers. There is increased knowledge sharing and growth in online communities of shared interests. New and exciting ways of presenting the same information are becoming available.

So even as we witness the evolution of the Web into its Web 2.0 form, we can already feel its revolutionary impact!

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BI Maturity: You can’t get there from here!

May 20, 2008

I spent last weekend fishing with my father, brother and nephews. Since they live in Connecticut and I in Ohio - we decided to meet half way - somewhere in “The Alleghenies and Her Valleys” to quote the brochure. While I usually rely on my trusty Magellan GPS, I had given it to my oldest daughter to borrow as she was driving south where the weather is warm. So that left me driving through the mountains and her valleys around midnight. Driving through a small town on a small road, looking for a very small park proved more than a challenge. Since I have three daughters and one wife, I have learned to swallow my pride and ask directions. I did, but on my walk in to the “Sheetz” gas station, I was thinking they might give me that response…”Well, you can’t get there from here - you gotta go somewhere else, then loop back around to get there.” However, I received perfect directions! Thank you Mr. Sheetz!

But that got me thinking as I stumbled upon a poster from the TDWI folks that spoke about BI maturity and adoption. It was a few years old, but some things are so true. I was excited to see that old friend and took some time to write up my thoughts on the matter - as well as capture their context. You can visit their poster ‘2005 BI Maturity Model’ at http://www.tdwi.org/publications/display.aspx?id=7288.

In case you are wondering how I am going to tie the first two paragraphs together, here goes. From my experience, when senior leadership learns of the value that BI can bring, they really want to ‘get this thing going’. They want to launch a large, comprehensive, enterprise-wide, based-on-the-new-tools, BI innovation that will hit home runs and win ball games. Well the problem is that you can’t get there from here. :)  There is a progression that must happen. Farmers can’t just throw seed on the ground and expect to make a profit - there is work to be done to prepare the soil correctly, then lots of care and feeding, praying for rain (but not too much rain) and then F  I  N  A  L  L  Y  –> the harvest!

TDWI states that “Most organizations go through six stages when evolving their BI environment from a cost-center operation to a strategic resource that drives the business and shapes the market.”

Using their framework, here is how I break it down…

1.     The Beginning (TDWI calls it ‘Prenatal’):  Since this is mostly financial, there are a medium amount of standards and not much flexibility. The control is dictated from finance or finance needs. Causal users account for most activity. Power users may make use of this type of information and leverage it into their own ‘shadow’ systems. The problem is that there is a large IT backlog for these reports. The problem here is the information gap - we get the information after the decision had to be made. This decision latency could contribute to the wrong direction as the data it is built on is often not fresh. However, at this stage, a general ‘awareness’ exists - there is at least the existence of the correct information. To get here, there is a larger initial investment and costs are high as economies of scale are not yet a reality.

  • Architecture: Management Reporting
  • Scope: System
  • Type of System: Financial
  • Analytics: Paper Report
  • User: All
  • BI Focus: What Happened?
  • Executive Perception: Cost Center

 

2.     Army of One (TDWI calls it ‘Infant’): Lots of flexibility and not any standards to speak of - other than what is negotiated from one user to another. People think local and resist any global initiatives. Causal users use decline, while power users step in to take advantage of this new information. Still, power users are reliant on IT to set the stage for their data and IT continues to struggle with a backlog of requests. As we extract the right data and manually assemble it to address business problems, there is an understanding of what factors are leading to what business results. Cost are somewhat low as analysts are using their own tools and working with certain data sets extracted by IT.

  • Architecture: Spreadmarts
  • Scope: Individual
  • Type of System: Executive
  • Analytics: Briefing Book
  • User: Analyst
  • BI Focus: What Will Happen?
  • Executive Perception: Inform Executive

 

3.     Working as a team (TDWI calls it ‘Child’): Flexibility is somewhat high, but at this point is waning as people within the department begin to work together. But still not many standards to speak of - other than what is negotiated from one user to another or driven from within the department. People still think/act from a local perspective and resist any global initiatives. Causal users use starts to trend up to take advantage of some individual benefits provided to them at the department level. Once the organization deploys data marts based on the emerging standards, the BI environment becomes a self service type, where the bottle neck that once existed within IT has been removed. At this stage, an understanding of why things have happened is occurring because knowledge workers are using analytical systems to extract data to their own needs and using that data to draw conclusions about business events. Costs begin to creep a small amount as some technology is purchased, but overall not a big factor.

  • Architecture: Data Marts
  • Scope: Departmental
  • Type of System: Analytical
  • Analytics: Interactive Report
  • User: Knowledge Worker
  • BI Focus: Why Did It Happen?
  • Executive Perception: Empowers Workers

 

4.     Thinking bigger (TDWI calls it ‘Teenager’): Flexibility starts to fade as division wide standards arise. People see the need to work together and are driven by common divisional goals. Here there is an atmosphere of negotiation and consolidation as these standards are built out. Now causal user use is on the rise, as the wide standards lead to increased reliability on the data available within the BI ‘system’. Power users use remains flat; but their ideas are rolled back in to divisional solutions; they are seen as subject matter experts and are often tapped to provide leadership and direction for their domain.  The focus here is customized delivery at the divisional level; dashboards, scorecards, report cards and the like.  At this stage, managers are making use of the divisional wide dashboards and are given real time information that is actionable - what is happening right now.  Costs are rising as we work within the division to develop standards and customized delivery.

  • Architecture: Data Warehouse
  • Scope: Division
  • Type of System: Monitoring
  • Analytics: Dashboard
  • User: Manager
  • BI Focus: What Is Happening?
  • Executive Perception: Monitor Processes

 

5.     Mature (TDWI calls it ‘Adult’): Standards are formed at the enterprise level. Governance groups are now formal processes with the proper structure and sponsorship. Senior level support is solid. Although flexibility takes a dip at first as the organization learns, flexibility then trends up as efficiencies and learnings are gained. Truly people are planning globally to act local at this stage. At this stage, executives are also onboard as the mature BI environment serves to align all players within the organization.  The causal users use the system to help them understand what they should be working on and how their efforts affect the organization as a whole. The delivery mode transitions from a divisional perspective to the enterprise but is also balanced; balanced or cascading scorecards are the focus of the organization and serves as the single point of truth to answer the questions about our goals and progress towards them.  At this stage, executives are using the BI environment as a communication tool to both align the organization on goals and objectives as well as communicate the results and current situations. These pivotal points are balanced all the way through the organization and are socialized in a manner that is equal to business strategy. The balanced or cascading scorecards open up alternative decisions as all indicators that lead to a ‘score’ are actionable. Costs rise again because of the enterprise level investment and collaboration, but the value should increase dramatically.

  • Architecture: Enterprise Data Warehouse
  • Scope: Enterprise
  • Type of System: Strategic
  • Analytics: Cascading Scorecards
  • User: Executive
  • BI Focus: What Should We Do?
  • Executive Perception: Drive The Business

 

6.     Harvesting Relationships or Partnerships (TDWI calls it ‘Sage’): Leveraging the mature BI environment  by opening up that business service to clients is the last stage. Here standards and control continue to be formed, but originates from client relationships. Flexibility is also harvested as new ideas, thoughts, concepts are embraced by the mature BI environment. At this stage, our BI environment can now be thought of as a BI Utility for our customers; helping them to solve their business problems by making use of the organization’s rich and focused information in the form of customer focused solutions deployed to help build or bind relationships, thus increasing the value proposition to them by the organization. At this stage, the BI Utility becomes a needed part within the customer’s infrastructure (whether it be for a single customer’s need for specific and unique information or for a company with complex business processes). Costs take a dip, the data/information infrastructure is in place and the capital expenditure has been amortized. Tools already exist to develop rich applications.  The value increases exceedingly abundantly here, as a very narrow scoped application brings a deep penetration of partnership.

  • Architecture: Analytical Services
  • Scope: Inter-Enterprise
  • Type of System: Business Service
  • Analytics: Embedded BI
  • User: Customer
  • BI Focus: What Can We Offer?
  • Executive Perception: Drive The Market

 

Now that you know… Where do you see your organization? How can you actualize the next stage? What are some value statements that you can take to senior leadership? What business problems can you address? What type of socialization strategy will work best? Where should you invest and what will the return look like? Who can you trust to help you get there from here without shortcutting the maturity journey - proper growth is built on a series of solid foundations. These sucesses are the underpinnings of the needed BI elements; Trust, Vision, Focus, Value, Momentum…repeat.

Happy Maturing!

Scott Felten

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Written by Scott Felten · Filed Under Information Technology | 1 Comment 

Some SharePoint competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 space…

May 19, 2008

There’s been a lot of buzz over the past couple of months around companies who are pitching their products against SharePoint. Just the fact that companies are targeting SharePoint tells you that it is the product to beat. For instance, have you read about the offerings from Google and IBM?

Here’a a link to a ZDNet article saying Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites. And here’s another one asking: Is Google Sites going to be a SharePoint killer?

Both articles conclude that for all the hype surrounding Google Sites and Google Apps, apparently they still have a long way to go to catch up to SharePoint. Also, given that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for free with Windows Server 2003, users do not need to pay any licensing fees to use the basic collaboration platform available with SharePoint. And by the way, did you know that Office Live Small Business (which provides everything you need to take your small business online, including a free website, free email, free online business applications, etc.) and Office Live Workspaces (an online place to save, access, and share documents and files), are built on SharePoint products?

IBM recently announced how they’d like to “liberate” your apps from SharePoint. Also look at another article around the same topic. IBM acknowledges the “viral adoption of SharePoint” in the enterprise, almost like Lotus Notes back in the 90s. And it’s interesting to note that the man behind the success of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, isn’t with IBM or Lotus, but is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft! Hmmm… And I know of at least 2 major corporations with a huge presence in Cincinnati, OH, that have decided to move away from Lotus Notes to SharePoint! I guess we have to wait and see if Quickr is able to stem this flow…

Evans Data Corporation’s recently surveyed over 400 developers for its May 2008 report on “Web 2.0 Developer Programs - 2008 Rankings”. Some folks might be surprised to hear that Google came in at second place. So who came in first? Apparently, “the strength of Microsoft’s Windows Live offerings for Tools and SDKs and Web Services allow them to finish first overall”.

So it seems that SharePoint is not something an organization would want to ignore or take lightly - plus, serious web 2.0 developers need to more closely look at Microsoft’s offering in this area.

 

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Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Information Technology | Leave a Comment 

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