The Digital Cloud

Cloud computing coming of age

2008-11-19T17:23:21Z

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?

2008-11-18T17:22:11Z

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?

Marketing as a conversation

2008-11-17T18:00:21Z

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

2008-11-14T14:45:06Z

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

2008-11-13T02:36:50Z

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

Mini nuclear power plant anyone?

2008-11-12T07:15:45Z

The guardian paper in the UK and other sites have been reporting that nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years!

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground. They will be the delivered on the back of a truck, must be refuelled every 7 or so years and will cost around US $25m each. Available to you from around 2013.

The US government has apparently licensed the technology for this to a company called Hyperion. Their web site provides more information.

Although this looks a bit like the nuclear equivalent of "vapourware" at present, if nuclear energy is going to grow this might be the way it is going to happen. What do you think?

Your data on your balance sheet?

2008-11-09T11:36:42Z

IBM has predicted that data will become an asset on the balance sheet for companies and that data governance will become a statutory requirement (presumably in the States) during the next four years!

I came across this rather interesting prediction while researching information governance and although the announcement itself is a couple of months out of date, I thought it was worth pointing out and to ask whether anyone else thinks this is likely. The predication came as one of a set of five predictions announced by the IBM Data Governance Council. The five predictions are:

Data governance will become a regulatory requirement in an increasing number of countries and organizations.
The value of data will be treated as an asset on the balance sheet and reported by the Chief Financial Officer while the quality of data will become a technical reporting metric and key IT performance indicator.
Calculating risk will be used more pervasively across enterprises for small and large decision-making and will be increasingly automated by information technology.
The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) will change, making this corporate officer responsible for reporting on data quality and risk to the Board of Directors
Individual employees will be required to take more responsibility for recognizing problems and participating in the governance process

The council represents 50 companies so this is not just IBM looking to push its own agenda, which of course it is. Although the claim that the group, largely from the financial sector, have "pioneered best practices around risk assessment" doesn't really ring so true these days!

The announcement can be found here. I believe that when this council talks about Data Governance they are really talking about it from a data quality perspective rather than a broader Information Governance requirement. However they do say the council is planning to create an Information Governance Framework in the near future. As usual we have the common issue of the liberal use of terms without enough clear definition (including in this post), which is something we struggle with in the oil industry too! It is not clear what is the difference between data governance and information governance or even between data and information for instance, either in the press release or on the related IBM website.

I am not sure that we will see data recorded on the balance sheet so soon. I see this as just another sign that there is a growing awareness of the importance of information to organisations and ensuring that it managed appropriately. But the question is still there. Do you think we will see data recorded as an asset on the balance sheet in the near future?

An information Management Fairytale

2008-10-29T13:20:49Z

I often come across videos on YouTube that tells an interesting story in a clever and imaginative way. However it would be fair to say that it is not often that a tale about information management fits into this category. But yesterday I found this - enjoy!

Collaborative authoring

2008-10-12T11:50:49Z

I have had a number of conversations with people over the last few days and weeks regarding online collaborative tools. Of course there are Wikki's but while being an excellent tool a Wikki would not actually provide a rich enough experience for a lot of people. There are a number of hosted productivity tools now available on the web that provide great authoring environments combined with "designed in" collaborative tools.

Below are the links to two online authoring tools that in my view provide a richer experience than a standard Wikki. The first is Buzzword a very nice online word processor with built in collaboration capability. The second is Sliderocket an online presentation application also with some very nice collaborative capabilities. This application also allows you to be able to track activity related to your presentations in terms of visits, down to individual slides etc.

I use both and can recommend them. Worth a look if your are interested in that sort of thing.

Digital Shadow

2008-09-18T07:42:55Z

I have learnt a new term today - Digital Shadow

Apparently your “Digital Shadow” is, all the digital information generated about the average person on a daily basis – which now surpasses the amount of digital information individuals actually create themselves.

A liitle scary!