The Power to Be Decisive
What is an intelligent enterprise? That is the question
By David Stodder
Intelligent Enterprise is approaching its third anniversary. With the
summer upon us and much of the IT industry in a lull thanks to a laggard
economy and earnings reports that belong in a Stephen King novel, I
thought I might pull back from my usual discussion of inflamed industry
debates. Instead, with a cold beverage in hand, it seems like an
appropriate time to settle into a lawn chair, stare off into the summer
sky, and ponder the passions of Intelligent Enterprise itself.
In September 1998, we swallowed hard, said adios to two successful
publications (DBMS and Database Programming & Design), and set our
course for the next generation of enterprise computing. For 10 years,
our two previous publications chronicled the explosive growth in
database management systems and the truly revolutionary change in
application development enabled by standardization on SQL and the
relational data model. While both publications offered analysis of
current trends and product developments, the main course was practical
guidance written by experts in the field.
We have carried this model forward with Intelligent Enterprise. But
the terrain is now different from what it was: and thus, our target with
this publication has been different. By not naming ourselves after an
obvious technology category (such as databases) or a trendy buzzword
(such as CRM), we begged a central question: What the heck is an
intelligent enterprise? Frankly, we welcome the question, which I
believe is at the heart of the matter when it comes to deriving value
from IT investments. The question begins a debate that we should be
having as organizations move beyond the worship of technology for its
own sake. And if that debate can happen within the pages of this
magazine, or within the friendly confines of our Web-based communities -
well, that's the kind of dream that editors, writers, and publishers
live for!
BUSINESS/IT SYNERGY
Increasingly, business leaders want to know: Do the substantial
investments we've made in IT make our organization more responsive to
changing market conditions, customer behavior, and opportunities to save
or make money? To borrow from our tagline, business leaders want to know
how IT solutions can help their organizations become smarter, faster,
and more profitable. Each new generation brings to the foreground
business leaders who are much more tech-savvy - or at least have played
a lot more video games - than the previous generation. These "C-level"
executives, so coveted by the vendors' sales teams, understand the
necessity of deploying IT solutions to achieve today's business
goals.
However, the smarter ones also know that technology is a means to an
end: just because you have the technical ability to sell cat litter over
the Web doesn't mean it's necessarily a good business plan to do that.
IT leaders agree that synergy with business objectives is the optimal
relationship they must seek to give IT investments the right context and
value. But they also know that as applications, databases, and other
systems become part of the core infrastructure, these investments need
to be shielded from the whims of changing business objectives.
"Business/IT synergy" has been the Holy Grail for as long as I've
been an editor in this industry. The pursuit has met with mixed success
as it has confronted cultural, technical, and even political boundaries.
Enterprise data architectures have foundered on incompatible definitions
of such seemingly basic notions of who customers are and what
constitutes a "product." In many organizations, teams of IT
professionals work on projects that report directly to line-of-business
executives, rather than the CIO. But too often, the result is yet
another layer of incompatible applications that merely add to the
integration headaches already pounding inside the CIO's head.
An intelligent enterprise understands the strengths and weaknesses of
both the business and IT sides of this essential synergy. It takes
advantage of the evolution of standards and technology to seek the right
abstraction level, based on enduring goals, where both sides feel as
though they're speaking the same language.
POWER OF THE PYRAMIDS
My own definition of an intelligent enterprise is one that enables
decision makers to have the knowledge and confidence to act decisively.
Who are the decision makers? Well, back in the early days of "decision
support" it was a small group of high-level executives. The business
intelligence industry has helped push data-driven decision-making out to
a much wider spectrum of users. Today, ideally they are business
personnel who are closest to the point where an action needs to be taken
- in the supply chain, on the phone with a customer, or at a strategic,
executive-level meeting. With self-service applications available over
the Web, customers are now increasingly able to make decisions for
themselves. Realtime systems, intelligent agents, and robots will soon
put decision-making power deep into far-flung applications.
At Intelligent Enterprise, we consider the category of solutions
loosely called "business intelligence" (data warehousing, OLAP, data
mining, and decision support) central to the mission of supporting
decision-makers. However, like all buzzword categories, this one doesn't
fit entirely comfortably - and also carries the danger of blinding us to
critical developments going on "outside the box." Our view is that we
are in the midst of an exciting, enormous change that is going to bind
business intelligence to all sorts of applications, not just those
focused on query and reporting. But first, we must rise out of the
confines created by how databases developed.
To borrow from a recent talk by Usama Fayyad, president, CEO, and
cofounder of digiMine, the database age was like the era in which the
Egyptians built the great pyramids. The pyramids were marvels of
engineering; their construction was an incredible feat that still
boggles the mind. But they were tombs: and so Fayyad's analogy is that
in our information age, businesses are missing opportunities if they
settle for database "tombs" or applications accessible only by
specialists in arcane languages, symbols, and cultures.
Information lives by the network effect: its value grows as it
becomes more useful; it gains power when it can affect decisions, which
lead to actions. Yet, surveys tell us that right now, most organizations
know that they are tapping only a small fraction of their own
information resources, much less than those available through external
sources. And in a cruel twist on Moore's Law, the information resources
are growing much faster than users' ability to derive value from
them.
Whether large, small, or somewhere in between, the greatest databases
are marvels of architecture, engineering, and development - all of them.
While no one would dare minimize the management challenges, probably the
greater challenge is how to knit together the myriad data resources.
Unless there's something we don't know about the Egyptian Pharoahs'
afterlives, the great pyramids did not afford integration and sharing of
their vital contents. Managers of today's data pyramids are struggling
with these issues as well.
TOUCHING ALL BASES
Middleware is about the use of data, which has complicated the
success of "horizontal" solutions confronted with "vertical" challenges
dictated by industry, legal, technical, and organizational concerns. The
trick is to find the right level of abstraction that enables
integration, but also allows systems and people to do what they do best.
Will XML provide this? Component middleware? J2EE? Most likely, the
ultimate, "intelligent" solution is still out there.
Solutions that create intelligent enterprises must touch all sorts of
systems, transgressing a multitude of data owners' bastions and systems
requirements. Integration is fundamental to excellence in enterprise
information portals, which ideally represent the finished product staged
for the joy of the user. Progress toward this exciting goal will not be
easy; but you can count on Intelligent Enterprise to bring into its
pages the ideas of those who are making it happen.
Speaking on behalf of our entire editorial staff (from my spot out
here on the lawn, that is), we invite your thoughts on what an
intelligent enterprise must be. We know that you are a passionate bunch.
Don't spare us your most energetic visions.
David Stodder [dstodder@cmp.com]
is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.