Enterprise Information Management

Abracadabra and Digital Content

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:30:29 +0000

“Abracadabra” as childhood this is related to something appearing in hand of magician by just uttering these words. Making something appear has always fascinated me since childhood be it magician in circus show or locating your lucky shirt when you need it most or now in professional world searching for content from huge data stored in digital format.

Yes I am referring to upcoming stream called “ediscovery”. This means process through which we can make things appear which are stored in computer or network for purpose of reproducing them as evidence in court of law. Law Instructed or Government backed ethical hacking also comes in preview of this domain

With new nature of frauds coming into our way and most of state governments working on laws to protect cyber crimes and ensure quality of output it becomes all the more important to focus on this stream.

Although “eDiscovery” has recently caught my attention and I am still thinking about this. To me it is more than technology. It deinately has some element of law, security and compliance all built into it. Though I am not a law expert but I can certainly pay attention to IT related issues where technology can be used

Few Scenarios which can boost this stream of work are:

1. With search coming into shape and latest technologies coming our way to perform advanced searches. It makes it possible to search digital content using advanced algorithms

2. Digital Data once written over network cannot be lost easily. Retention and Archiving Policies make sure that we can retrieve desired information back

As part of ediscovery all kind of data can be searched ranging from images, movies or text content. Emails and Chat Messages are another important source of information which can be required to search and reproduce.

This whole stream can be serviced with following services:

1. Data Analysis

2. Data Retrieval and Conversion

3. Scanning

4. Metatagging data for easy retrieval

5. Indexing and Processing of data

6. Exporting

7. Printing

8. Quality Control

9. Recognition of data

With lot of legality and complexity involved in this topic I intend to DISCOVER (and invent) more and write about it.

Any thoughts from your side?

Open Source Wave

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:21:29 +0000

Imagine your wife defining daily time table for your lifestyle. What if someone has already prescribed on how you will work, how to party what to eat when to drive and when to relax. Ummmh I am sure we all will run for our life in that case
Freedom is something we all aim for. Human Philosophy urges us to aim to greater independence and distance itself from any kind of rules and boundaries
Even market forces have proved to world time and again that self managed markets are always poised for greater growth and new highs. Same is true for any business. We have seen Indian markets flourishing to new heights after Government of India gave freehand in 1992. Since nationalized banks have lost monopoly in markets or PSU have given space to private telecom operators customers have experienced new kind of market revolution working to their favor in India. Today we have lowest call rates for mobile in India.
We can extend same concept to IT industry, where defined interfacing standards among hardware vendors has lead to greater drive for introducing innovative products in marketplace. Same drive we can see coming our way in Software Industry through Open Source Community.
I just referred to “Open Source Community” drive which is motion since last 30 years with development of Unix. This has become more prominent since inception of internet with communities working towards creating useful tools and technologies.
From Small and Mid Sized companies’ perspective, it provides them with better cost saving options and large enterprises use them to free themselves from lock in of big IT vendors and develop better control over enterprise class applications.
Until recently Open Source Software are invariably associated with term “Free”. However it simply means that source code is available and users are free to modify software to suit their needs. Soon companies and institutions started associating business with this model. It is definitely money generating business model which is posing threat to established commercial platforms in application servers, portal server or content management solution space. However with the intensity of investments planned by IT service consumers it hints at another “commoditized” IT service capability in the pipeline. Another exciting side of the story is that the even mainstream IT Service Providers are looking forward to explore the benefits of open source software to control cost in large transformational programs. Open Source Solution stack is always solution option for pre project analysis exercise.
More precisely, Open Source Software provides four essential freedoms*:
·         The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
·         The freedom to study how the program works, and change it (freedom 1).
·         The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
·         The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)..
* As per GNU Public License Policy
Whatever end result may be I am sure this wave is being noticed and world would develop more interest and attention towards this cause in time to come.

Advanced Analytics in Corporate Banking...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:24:29 +0000

This is in continuation of the Advanced Analytics blog that appeared sometime ago. Here I tried to present a business scenario on how it is applicable for a well known space called Corporate Banking.
Let me highlight some of the aspects that are relevant for the Corporate Banking. We have lot of participants like Customer Relationships, Portfolio Managers, Product Managers, Regional Managers, Risk Managers, and Finance Managers, who are all interested in different aspects of the customer relationship. Everyone wants to understand their own piece of thing, wants different reports in an ever changing environment. But all are interested in digging through information that has single version of truth. Added to this complexity, in Corporate World, companies get acquired and sold quite frequently. This changes main information called customer hierarchy. Interest rate fluctuations, and currency conversions also keep changing.

Data is an asset

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:43:44 +0000

Data is an asset for an organization. We have heard this data management principle multiple times. It has been clichéd to the core but most organizations fail to understand the true meaning of this principle. Let me try and explain this by using an analogy. Let us take an equally clichéd analogy of a car to look at this principle from a new perspective.

EIM - Where we lost the plot

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:09 +0000

Every one's been talking about "Enterprise" word, and BI is no exception. We all have been hearing and providing multiple roadmaps on Enterprise BI/Reporting, & agree that its not an easy nut to crack - multiple reasons attributed to it. Diversified business, products, customers, geographies organization operate globally, departmental goals and systems to support them never were built to hand shake. What this effectively boils down to is a huge data store which is there to sort our problems, but instead we got lost in trying to integrate, and make business/strategic sense out of this.

Are you paying attention, or is it the other way around?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:13:30 +0000

I was browsing through the net last week when I came across a research which claims that the average attention span of an internet user is dropping and is approximately 4 seconds currently. Now that was a shocking statistic considering that if the users do not pay attention, then what is the point of millions of dollars of investments made by companies into rich website and online advertising?

I guess I wasn’t the first one to arrive at this conclusion. After a little more digging, I came across the concept of Attention Economy . Basically information on the web has exploded and the choice available to the end user is making it more and difficult for them to be able to filter out what they are really interested in. This affects both users looking for information they need as well as or organizations who are creating the information for you. So organizations have started to realize that your attention is becoming a scarce commodity and are willing to do anything and everything possible to grab it, maybe even pay for it. So what impact will this trend have on the space of Information management, especially portals, content management and search? Here are some thoughts:

EIM – Mimicking our own "Human Nervous System"?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:59:13 +0000

I have always been fascinated by the way –we ‘human’ – manage the information through our Nervous System. To explain further – We capture information through 5 basic senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), store it in brain, create various patterns of it and access it wherever needed. Hence, I believe, that we technology companies (product/services) are trying to 'mimic' human nervous system for Enterprise Information Management. And my opinion is that we should mimic it as it is evolved over million years and is foolproof. Believe me? Probably not, at least now.

Analyzing Analytics

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:32:13 +0000

If your wife adds (if you are the lucky one) additional 1/2 tea spoon sugar in your bed tea, can you imagine what would be the impact on your blood sugar level and to maintain the ideal balance with calorie count how many extra steps you’ll be running. Mass penetration of internet and ever increasing health consciousness in society has ensured that everyone has easy access to appropriate diet charts and general health tips such as above are addressed to some extent. However, healthcare providers around the world who are facing the pressure of patients and healthcare authorities to improve quality care with no complications, seek an analytical solution to empower them with robust tool to analyze data and regularly identify patients at risk.

Information Management Roadmap guidelines

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:58:07 +0000

You can notice Information Management (IM) space is quite hot these days. There are multiple tools coming into the market to put the power of knowledge in the hands of business users. These are also coming to the aid of IT Teams, in reducing their workloads, and enabling them to focus more on the data and information governance aspects. But quite often we lose track of the important principles that we need to follow. Albeit these are not quite difficult to follow, but are essential.

Advanced Analytics: An Intro

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:12:14 +0000

We have already gone thru a long cycle in IT, starting from application development, implementation of off-the-shelf applications, Datawarehouses and Business Intelligence applications. Industry is focussed more on Analytics now. Analytics take the top most in the BI Space, when it comes to kind of insights and the value it adds in decision making.

Credit Crunch BI

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:25:01 +0000

Economic downturn has caused many upheavals in the Corporate world. This also resulted in significant shift in Corporate priorities. As you all know one of the first items to be trimmed happens to be the IT Budget. This places tremendous pressure on the CIOs. Most of the IT Surveys done in 2009 show that BI, Server virtualisation, ERPs, Portals and EAI are the top priorities for CIOs, in the same order.

Information Access

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:22:59 +0000

These days there are many information access tools in the market. Corporates use Reporting tools, Business Intelligence Tools, Interactive Visualisation tools, Search platforms to carryout their information access services.

Vendor Spend Analytics

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:19:53 +0000

To remain competitive, companies are focusing heavily on reducing the costs and increasing the profits. Some of the strategies adopted by companies are in Outsourcing manufacturing, taking up assembling only, or resorting to selling only. Vendor Spend Analytics (VSA, in short) is a concept that focuses on reducing costs.

Will Enterprise Mashups “mashup” the Enterprise?

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:37:22 +0000

I recently came across a very nice video explaining about enterprise mashups (Watch Video). All of us in IT know those mission critical projects with tight schedules, last minute problem solving with moving goalposts and suffering from the dreaded scope creep. So the image of having the users doing their stuff on their own while I’m relaxing in an armchair with a nice glass of wine is quite appealing. But will Enterprise Mashups get me there?

Collaborative Business Solutions

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:07:29 +0000

So, I finally made it to the Gartner PCC conference this year – in spite of budget cuts, travel cuts and continued pressure on the business to optimize costs and deliver results only to find that the most a la mode ‘new’ FLA (Four Letter Acronym, as opposed to TLA...Three Letter Acronym) this quarter was CEVA – Content Enabled Vertical Applications. That seems like a mouthful...but it is an interesting concept. My issue with it is that we have had content rich applications for a long time, so what’s new? The fundamental difference between what we had before and what we have now is that we have finally figured out that knowledge/ information workers do not work in ‘process-mode’ they work in ‘network-mode’ . I think that that the key word here should be ‘Collaborative’ and not ‘Content’. So, I am going to attempt to come up with my own TLA – ‘Collaborative Business Solutions’. These are a genre of business solutions that require collaboration amongst information workers to get the job done. Solutions such as Contract Management, Litigation Support, Correspondence Support etc. I would like to start a thread based on this to come up with a collaborative definition of CBA. Let me know your thoughts...