Welcome to 2009!

The team and I at Ventana Research through development of new research agendas for 2009 have identified business and technology thematic topics that will be critical to all organizations. These topics will be critical for business and IT to be more educated and savvy on how to leverage them for their organizations. These are our assertions and not just predictions for success in this year and we remain optimistic that business can drive significant change in how they use information and technology to advance their processes and people who operate them along with management who need better tools for being effective in their decisions.

Business Collaboration and Networking
The importance of collaboration in organizations for supporting top down, bottom up and point to point interactions is critical for improving operations and performance. Supporting collaboration that goes beyond traditional email and instant messaging that is part of your processes and management is more important than the utility of itself. This context I believe has changed into the largest online revolution since the introduction of the Internet and electronic mail itself with social networking. This networking for social purposes and the dramatic growth of Facebook builds on the road paved by mySpace, Compuserve of the past and others blending all age groups into a new forum for personal and business interactions. The business networking  aspects of this revolution engages individual’s careers and jobs into social and personal aspects of people’s lives. The viral aspect of the networking has also played well for LinkedIn who brings the specific business focus for engaging people to network within your organization or others. This also helps individuals network into alumni for leveraging the knowledge of the past that could be relevant in the present. In 2009, I believe we will see the progressive organizations engage and not ignore the human element of collaboration and networking from social and business aspects to put it to work for the business. More businesses like Ventana Research will establish their company face on these networking sites to ensure they are represented as a brand and employer that is embracing the future methods to collaborate with customers, employees and interested parties more efficiently.

Can your organization utilize Facebook or LinkedIn to advance your business efforts?

Let me know your thoughts  or come and collaborate with us on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Welcome to 2009. Some of you got some rest and others probably like myself had a lot to do for preparing for this year that has some of largest business and economic complications seen for many decades. I am not sure that 2008 was a year that many could say was as outstanding as one thought at the beginning of year. At some point in the year many organizations decided to delay or proceed slowly on their business and IT focused information and technology projects. IT organizations had to adjust with fewer resources and management sent immediate new to hold new projects as budget plans turned to ice as the business forecasts turned gloomy. Business did reform their efforts as they looked for methods to improve or develop their new business intelligence and performance management efforts but many could not invest at any level that they should to operate as effective as they would like.

Business found new classes of applications that can help them manage their specific line of business areas like sales, customer, HR, supply chain and others. These applications brought forward operational and performance activities into applications to support them in being more effective not just more efficient. These individuals and groups of applications continued to expand and establish into categories like sales performance management, customer performance management, workforce performance management but also expand further established ones like financial performance management and supply chain performance management. Each of these are building on the transactional history of other applications and categories like ERP, CRM and others  that came out of the 80’s and 90’s. Just as promising is the help for the CIO who now sees using this approach can help their management and organization with IT Performance Management. Of course, not to leave out organizations who have started business or operational wide performance management transformations of how they use information to manage their organizations. Supporting business to be better in planning, achieving goals and managing metrics and key performance indicators in the context of their business focus will play out to be the top business item for 2009 as the complexities of the economy and environment need to be rationalized and prioritized more easily than through meetings and emails.

The need for Business Intelligence to become closer to the information management technologies of the enterprise was a large investment by many technology vendors as IT continues to advance BI into the enterprise. At the same time, BI had to improve in usability and context to support the business needs for performance management. Now as business finds the restrictions of personal productivity software from the 90’s limiting their ability to drive change, the need to make BI more interactive and flexible to adapt to how people work was a driving force in the new releases and roadmap of almost all BI technology providers. But make no mistake the need for BI has never come at a more important time in the economic and advancing generations of the workforce that are accustomed to interacting more routinely over the Internet and social forums.

Making information more interactive is important but requires analytics and even micro-analytics that are specialized and focused on specific sets of data is improving the value of applications. This step to making information more relevant and useful has advancing the use of modeling, workflow, rules, search and process technologies all are bringing new power to people for business and IT. In the world of information, the utilization of events into what is called complex event processing (CEP) supporting Operational Intelligence for faster information processing is also providing new alternatives to moving data from one database to another. The use of location for better geographic context is also providing the relevance needed for discovering important information that integrates content and data much faster and cheaper is now becoming well known as Location Intelligence. All of these and more are examples demonstrate how technology is advancing faster than many organizations have the budget or resources to fully leverage it.

Simultaneously the movement to information management has transitioned into smaller specific projects like database improvement for data warehousing or data integration to bite size MDM projects for customer, product and other areas that can reduce or avoid future costs. Of course managing larger volumes of data and making use of it advanced in 2008 with specialized database technologies like column and row oriented approaches along with specialized compression, processing and analytic techniques. These new databases are challenging the mainstreams RDBMS providers and are now easily available in the market and also into devices like appliances that simplify the software and hardware into one device and make installation and configuration easy.

Unfortunately the broader information architecture and processing improvements that most need did not get off the ground in any substantial manner. This was due to the changes in prioritization and reduction of investments into launching new IT projects.  And all of this does not help the basic building blocks of what organizations must do to share and engage with information and metrics in a consistent and quality manner. Unfortunately this kept business as usual for organizations who continue to use spreadsheets and presentations along with email as the foundation for decision making. This situation has given new life to the discussion and implementation of data governance for business and IT that needs to be established to ensure the consistency, quality and proper use of information for business. If this does not happen then we will hold back the efficient enterprise wide collaboration and improvements to the basic business intelligence (BI) and performance management processes.

Technology also continued to advance at a rapid pace with new devices and infrastructure that are now empowering new applications and capabilities for business. The advancements in mobility like Apple iPhone surprised many, not me, with their gain in market share. This is not a device for personal use but also business combined into a single easy to use device. The simplicity of the design and use, along with the platform for adding applications has changed how many now think about deployment and updates. Towards the end of the year RIM launched their response with Storm that brings the Blackberry user into a rich interactive experience. Both of these are already transforming business and personal computing which will help improve productivity and responsive of workforces.  On the deep technology side and advancing the interactive experience within the web browser and applications, Adobe has continued to challenge the conventional wisdom approach of just using Microsoft and .NET technologies. The embedding of Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex for bring Rich Internet Applications (RIA) to reality inside a range of applications and Business Intelligence was part of improving the usability and empowering new capabilities that was identified in research we did as the top two requirement for most of the line of business areas.

But clearly in this business environment, the leadership from executives and management to drive CIO and IT priorities will require renewed efforts to prioritize and determine what is most important to get done in 2009. We saw in 2008 many in business looking at their bill for technology and services wondering if they really understand what they have and what they are paying for. The necessity to be better prepared for what they need and become a more active player is critical for business to find the value of IT. It is clear that organizations will still need to purchase applications and information technology in many forms including cloud computing and software as a service to open source to advance their efforts. All of this will be necessary or the organization will fall behind in their industry or operate at higher costs over longer time periods.

I and the team at Ventana Research examined new research agendas for 2009 and have identified business and technology thematic topics that will be critical to all organizations. These topics will be critical for business and IT to be more educated and savvy on how to leverage them for their organizations. These are our assertions and not just predictions for success in this year and we remain optimistic that business can drive significant change in how they use information and technology to advance their processes and people who operate them along with management who need better tools for being effective in their decisions.

These topics come from examining the business and economic environment and from research Ventana Research conducted across thousands of organizations in 2008. The topics include areas that can help reduce costs and make improvements to the effectiveness of your efforts across your people and processes. Here are the top items for 2009 that I believe you should consider as you examine your efforts and as a courtesy have provided links to them in Wiki for a quick definition. Over the next several weeks new topics and discussions will come out every day through collaboration on our newly released business and social networking sites at LinkedIn and Facebook along with further in-depth research at www.ventanaresearch.com. This will help each of you take time to digest them one at a time and think about what you can do to help your efforts in these areas in a more concerted manner than just a new year’s resolution.

I and the Ventana Research team hope you enjoy these assertions and priorities for 2009 and that you can further your education and career to bring the best to your efforts individually and for where you work.

Let me know your thoughts   or come and collaborate with us on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Assertions and Priorities for 2009:

#1 Business and Social Collaboration and Networking (Details on Facebook & LinkedIn)
The importance of collaboration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration in organizations for supporting top down, bottom up and point to point interactions is critical for improving operations and performance. Supporting collaboration that goes beyond traditional email and instant messaging that is part of your processes and management is more important than the utility of itself...

#2 Cloud Computing for Business and IT (Details on Facebook & LinkedIn)
Cloud Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing has become part of the buzz and reality in 2008 as many organization who utilize applications, information and services operate somewhere other than inside of an organization IT department and data center. Building on top of the advances...

#3 Integrated Business Planning (Details on Facebook & LinkedIn)
The value of Integrated Business Planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_business_planning is the single most important lesson corporations should have learned from the economic downturn. Most were caught flat footed and struggled to adjust over the past two years as they were whipsawed by wild swings in commodity prices, energy costs, currency rates and ultimately a free fall in the economy...

Come and join Ventana Research in these forums and if you are not a member of these sites, time to sign up and start collaborating online!

Facebook - Company and Fan Page 

LinkedIn - Ventana Research Group 

I definitely know that in today’s climate being risk adverse is at the top of the list for many in business and IT. How can you not be risk adverse when so much is changing in our organizations and around the world in the global economic environment? You are not sure when to take action or if you are making the right decision. I have spoken a lot about sound business decisions using performance management processes and technology that provides you the information for understanding, optimizing and aligning to the business goals and objectives. Our recent benchmark on decision making and performance management found some troubling indicators to the lack of maturing and quagmire of spreadsheets and emails and these organizations have a different type of risk.

But what do you do to reduce risk in your business? Thinking about how to deal with risk in a new light and the impact to performance is something that is percolating in the industry across many circles as it is not just about the risk in finance with banking or credit, but the risk that happens every hour and every day in your organization and in the world. You have employees in your workforce who are aware and have visibility into issues that impact performance of your business. These kinds of issues or risk indicators could be something as simple as suppliers that are not able to fulfill in the right time frames, or customers who are critical to your business that are having major issues with existing inventory or products that will impact future purchases. These types of examples could be indicators to your ability to achieve specific business goals, or achieve the revenue target in the financial plan, but how would you know if you do not have a method and system to communicate and collaborate to provide information that could be critical to achieving specific performance expectations?

The most important information could be hundreds of data points that are visible and in the heads of your workforce but have you provided a method to communicate these potential risk issues? Can you correlate the information to specific points in your performance management processes from an expected performance metric or KPI or to a qualitative business objective? I now see where risk performance indicators and risk qualifiers will be the new concepts and forms of information that will be critical to embed into your management and operational systems. Knowing when to act or re-act must be made with sound information that will not always be just the information from your historical performance, or what is in your projected plan, but from sound intelligence that is provided by your workforce to a dedicated management system.

It is apparent that organizations that are not evolving their management processes to be collaborative and interactive are finding themselves in troubling times, and for others who might be in a somewhat recession proof industry, you still need to examine how to make the best of your activities and performance expectations. If you are not looking to take any more risk and want to avoid the risky business habits that are so apparent in organizations today, start to look at how establishing a new form of enterprise risk management to support your performance management efforts. This new effort could start to inject a lot more confidence into your organization let alone gain better visibility into risk and begin the dialogue on how to avoid it. Stay tuned as I outline more on this topic through our research efforts at Ventana Research and where we believe the next chapter of performance management will be addressing the inclusion of risk and invoking the needed communications and collaboration for your business health. Rob Kugel our SVP of Research just put some initial views on a research note called What’s the Risk? and where risk is going to address many of my points and more.

If you want to collaborate on this topic and where it will take performance management to the next level and introduce risk management, just let me know. Our efforts at Ventana Research will take new shape and form to educate the sophisticated individuals who want to avoid risk in their organization and look at new methods for addressing the uncertainty and confidence levels in decision making.

Let me know your thoughts.