Yet Another Revolution: Business at the Speed of Thought
June 7, 2009
I am all for speed when driving under the speed limit. I am not too keen on speed for speed’s sake. Call me an old fashioned addled goose. Business decisions made at speed can be interesting. For example, it a share of stock drops a percentage point, should one dump the stock or but more? What about shorting the stock? Make the incorrect decision and you can blow more of your available cash.
Some decisions require context, thought, in-depth research, and even a Twitter post or two over some period of time. Living for the moment may have thrilled Andrew Marvell’s readers, but the carpe diem approach to decision making can produce exciting consequences.
A Web site called Menafn.com published a story that got me thinking about velocity. The article was “SAP to Revolutionize BI with New Solution that Delivers Insight at the Speed of Thought” and you can read it here. SAP is the IBM-esque company that vies with SPSS, Cognos, and dozens of other heavyweights for number crunching services. Over the last decade, number crunchers have made an effort to suck in text, convert the unstructured content to a form that can be counted, and the mash up generates outputs. I have had a little experience with the outputs of BI systems, and I can tell you that setting up the systems, tuning them, coding the queries, and then helping the legions of MBAs figure out what’s in the reports is a good business. SAP has been for me a touchstone for how some software companies will evolve in the hostile financial climate some of my clients report as problematic to corporate navigators.
The Menafn.com Web site reported:
SAP AG. “This new software provides a clear line of sight and enables customers to achieve transparency in every corner of their business. Moving forward, solutions like SAP BusinessObjects Explorer will help businesses develop a new generation of informed executives, who will drive companies globally toward a path of greater transparency, growth and competitiveness.” Availability SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, accelerated version for SAP NetWeaver BW, is planned to be available during summer 2009. The solution will also be packaged and available through the Best-Run Now initiative from SAP. The package, called “Explore Your Business at the Speed of Thought,” will be available globally and is designed to meet the needs of diverse lines of business and industries.
Like the Nstein news release that caught my attention, SAP is nosing into the future release world of software; that is, this is “to be” stuff, not “as is” stuff. There a touch of revolutionary and truck load of promises. Nary a word about the TREX search system, how one can actually find the data to smunch together in a report, or any information about the role of Endeca, a company into which one unit of SAP injected investment.
I wonder if summertime makes some news release writers feel their inorganic oats. When software takes several years to deploy, I don’t have much confidence in Menafn’s assertion about “summer 2009”. How much transparency does a firm doing classified work or developing cutting edge pharmaceuticals require when making quick decisions? In my opinion, prudent decisions and some compartmentalization might be useful for contract compliance and the managers who are struggling to deal with the information flooding across their desks at this time. Future software doesn’t help too much in the real “now” but I suppose it sounds good to those outside my goose pond.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
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