Informatica Perspectives

The speed of innovation is accelerating as the state of mind and culture of technology users and vendors are shifting toward openness and collaboration. Dr. Eric Von Hippel from Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it this way in “Democratizing Innovation”:

“When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.”

Informatica has a 45,000+ member-strong developer network called Informatica TechNet. [Read more]

I know, it sounds like I’m talking in circles. If you want to keep your job, shouldn’t you create more work rather than eliminate it?  Let’s start by addressing the question about why organizations send jobs offshore. Sometimes the rationale for overseas staffing is related to acquiring unique expertise, implementing a follow-the-sun development model, or providing night-time support when it’s daytime on the other side of the globe.  But by far the overarching reason is simple – to save money! Let’s explore if this actually works.  [Read more]

I was chatting with some colleagues in the healthcare industry last week.  We were discussing the latest healthcare reforms in the USA and the role that technology plays.  Indeed the recent announcement by the World Health Organization that the Swine Flu epidemic has been raised to “pandemic” status is a clear indicator of the need to focus on saving lives.  There is nothing more powerful, or emotional, than hearing about lives being saved.  Technology plays a critical role in today’s society, but it is the ability to use technology to understand trusted data and then make life-saving decisions based on it is especially critical.

We were talking about a variety of examples of where a better understanding of data helps improve lives and save lives.  I want to talk about how and why data is critical.  Data allows us to understand what is happening, who is affected, where disease is spreading and how to combat it.  It’s not applications, or business process or people. Yes, all of these help – but at the heart of the ability to understand health is “data”.  We live in a real-time world where health issues are reported at the speed of light across the internet before we even wake up. We all watch, we all listen and we all observe.  Yet, how do we act?  How do we take in the data and act upon it? [Read more]

I recently attended HP’s Software Universe and a big theme of the conference was ‘winning the war of managing application performance’. Having spent time walking the solutions showcase floor, speaking to attendees and SI partners, I can say this is still a really big deal. As the growth and size of production applications at the core of business continues, organizations are faced with a significant and costly challenge that will only continue to get worse.

Another audience in attendance, namely members of the QA and testing teams responsible for ensuring the quality of production applications, building and protecting realistic testing environments for their internal applications is another huge challenge. These team members need to sub-set and create test environments without impacting production systems performance or requiring a duplicate hardware footprint. Masking and protecting the data once it’s pulled from production is also a necessary step of ensuring control of the information housed within these critical systems.

It was refreshing to hear these challenges from real practitioners trying to solve problems for some of the largest organization in the world. Their pain validated the need for Application ILM solutions. These are real production-impacting issues that if not addressed will have huge cost and productivity impacts. If you’re an Informatica partner or practitioner, expanding your knowledge of these new offerings might make you a hero! I urge you to take a look.

Generational bulges can have a profound impact on attitudes, culture, and opportunities as they move through organizations. I remember how Dr. Seymour Wolfbein, a business professor at my alma mater, Temple University, connected the dots between the advance of the hefty baby boom generation and management priorities, as members of this group crowded into organizations with their large numbers and new attitudes.

Now, baby boomers are the establishment, and their offspring, another large generation born between 1977 and 2001, is setting a new agenda for business — with profound implications for enterprise data management. [Read more]

With the move towards Pervasive BI, organizations are investing in or actively exploring the potential for injecting operational data into business processes. This might mean a sea change for business analysts (BAs). Traditionally, the BAs analyzed business needs, identified gaps and proposed specific solutions for tracking and managing metrics. This used to be a back-office operation primarily; if there were problems, the analysts corrected errors for business rules or data issues after the fact. Now with Pervasive BI, there is no such luxury because people can make high-stake decisions based on data supplied by those rules. It is also an opportunity for an organization to unite the business requirements with IT, and increase the areas of automation to drive productivity.

Undoubtedly, the BAs are mission-critical to organizations. However, the "identity crisis" is common among BAs, as concluded by Forrester Research analysts Carey Schwaber and Rob Karel. They found it difficult to define the duties of a "typical" BA even after reviewing 29,000 job listings and interviewing more than 300 of them. [Read more]

Our third stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘across the pond’ in London England.  Salesforce saw an early opportunity to expand the footprint (or should I saw ‘cloud print’) of their leading SaaS CRM system beyond the US and so we found a strong following and interest there.  While primarily a UK audience, the event drew enterprise users from across Europe as well as many budding startups and systems integrators looking to build cloud-based applications on the force.com platform.

We again sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our local UK customer sportingbet presented a case study describing how they have significantly improved their overall marketing automation efforts by integrating their operational platform with their Salesforce CRM and Eloqua marketing automation systems.  Linking the three platforms together enabled them to leverage information on their customers’ service usage and behavior to more effectively target marketing programs and promotions to sustain and increase their overall business.  Essentially achieving every marketers dream (including the author’s). [Read more]

The 9/11 commission report stated that,

Secure identification should begin in the United States. The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers’ licenses. Fraud in identification documentation is no longer just a problem of theft. At many entry points to vulnerable facilities, including gates for boarding aircraft, sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are…

We are now more acutely aware of the threat of terrorism than ever before and every society attempts to protect their citizens from it. Yet we live in a world where travel is easy.  We can move from place to place in a way that our grand-parents never believed possible. [Read more]

“The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic," Dr Margaret Chan Director-General of the World Health Organization said at a press conference last week.  “Nearly 30,000 confirmed cases have been reported in 74 countries … and no previous pandemic has been detected so early or watched so closely, in real-time, right at the very beginning”.

This is an extremely worrying time for us all and requires a strong focus by all governments to share data and help combat this pandemic.  I don’t know about you, but I am concerned.  Many years ago an outbreak of this sort would have happened without our knowing about it so quickly, and in so much detail.  It is significant to see the words “in real-time” spoken by Dr. Chan.  We live in a real-time world where incidents are reported across the airwaves as they happen.   No doubt, pharmaceutical companies around the world are working 24×7 to analyze data and help develop vaccines to combat the ongoing threat.  To do this, governments need to collaborate and share data.

Two weeks ago The Australian (Australia’s largest newspaper) reported on the need for real-time data to combat this outbreak.

No doubt we will continue to hear about the complexity of pulling together data from different sources, in different formats and the challenge of delivering a holistic view of data.  Well, I’m sorry, this is the 21st century. We live in a world where banks can process trillions of transactions and systems can deliver terabytes of data for analytical requirements.  Governments need to work together – to collaborate on this and other matters – whether it be dealing with this pandemic, or working together to lower carbon emissions through the Kyoto protocol.  You see, it’s all about the data – finding it, pulling it together, analyzing it and then acting upon it.  If there was ever a more profound demonstration of the need for data integration, then I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

Now more than ever governments around the world need to act.

The following are the remaining five "HBIs" (half-baked ideas) I am formulating to explore how SOA, cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization are shaping our information and business environments in the coming decade - the 2010s. These are based on a keynote speech I presented at the recent Cloud QCamp online event. (For HBIs 1-5, click here.)

HBI #6: Made to order — application vendors will become assemblers of made-to-order, pre-built software components. [Read more]