Cloud computing coming of age
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 17:23 There is a big buzz going on around cloud computing these days. Certainly much more than when I first started this blog a few years ago. There has been a lot of activity in this space recently with big announcements from all the big names. So in upcoming posts will will have a look at this "new era" of computing. But as a primer have a read of this article on the subject by the Economist.
Do you think cloud computing is the future?
Do Enterprise Mashups have potential?
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 17:22 The last few years have seen the mashup become one of the more important components driving the rise in popularity of what has become known as Web 2.0. But do mashups have a place in the Enterprise? My answer to that question is yes, but only if you have systems in place to manage the quality and availability of the enterprise information.
A mashup is defined by Wikipedia as a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. One example might be the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. So what is the potential for doing the same sort of thing in an organisation and will it be able to deliver real value?
The potential for combining different streams of data within a company into a new a value adding application should not really be any different from that outside the enterprise. There just needs to be an idea, the means and the will to create the new application. Have a look at this video from IBM which explains it a lot better than I can.
The key thing that the is really going to make this valuable though is the data feeds. Having standards based feeds with high quality trustworthy data will require significant effort to create and maintain, perhaps through a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach and once people really start innovating and build their own value adding applications on top of these feeds it will become critical import that the information is and remains of a high quality. Which means that Information Governance will have to be an important part of your strategy.
Do you think enterprise mashups are going to be a success?
Enterprise mashups in Information Governance, Web 2.0 Marketing as a conversation
Monday, November 17, 2008 at 18:00 Top marketing executives must continue to move beyond traditional advertising, marketing and brand awareness into a more transformative role across the enterprise, driving innovation through the business and becoming evangelists of customer engagement. This is according to a new report called Future Tense: The global CMO that has been written by the Economist Intelligence Unit under commission from Google.
Last week I mentioned the the Economist Intelligence Unit's report on the Future of Information Governance but now this unit has produced another interesting report about the things a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is doing now and what they should be doing in the future.
The leading Marketing people are beginning to realise that they need to move from a traditional, push information at your customers, marketing approach to one where you are having conversations with your customers. Furthermore the recent rise of social tools on the Internet such as Wikki's, blogs, and social networking has only increased the opportunity to have these conversations. Clearly there will be a greater need in the future for marketing strategies that include "new media" and approaches such as those used by the Information Management fairy-tale.
Some key points that I picked out were;
Mastering new modes of communication is critical to the marketers driving business innovation
Digital media, particularly their extension to mobile devices, have given consumers control over how they engage with advertisers
Consumers increasingly use digital media not just to research products and services but to engage the companies they buy from as well as other consumers who may have valuable insights
To remain competitive, companies must engage customers and exploit the interactive nature of digital media to create stronger affinity with their brands among consumers
The full report can be found here
Periodic table of videos
Friday, November 14, 2008 at 14:45 Some chemistry homework tonight and while doing a bit of a refresh as a result of the gap since my own school days I came across this Periodic Table of Videos.
I had actually had heard that it existed, but I found it by chance and finding cool stuff like this is one of the reasons why I love the Internet.
The future of Information Governance
Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 02:36 The implementation of company wide information Governance programmes to increase the strategic value of information can minimise costs and risk and turn information into a more consistent generator of business value, according to a new report on Enterprise Information Management Governance that has been written by the Economist Intelligence Unit under commission from EMC.
Some interesting quotes from the report;
Seventy-seven percent of respondents expect information governance to be important to their company's success through 2011, while 68% also expect the complexity of their company's information governance issues will grow during that same time period
Only 43% of companies rate the ability to integrate and share information across departments as good or very good. 21% say it is poor or very poor.
However nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents indicated their companies had no formal information governance program in place.
"Those that do have a formal information governance strategy in place report significant benefits"
Comment
I do feel though that there is an over emphasis on the risk aspects of Information Governance, driven largely by Information security and regulatory requirements. This probably just reflects that the majority of companies who are looking at Information governance at all are largely driven by risk.
However I believe that there are plenty of industries even those that are largely driven by risk that have a growing amount of extremely high-value information, the primary goal of governance should be to derive the full value from the information. Which likely requires some sort of conversation of the required balance of access and availability versus risk.
The report can be found here