SharePoint Increases Efficiency and Leads to Restructuring
April 5, 2012
Christian Buckley often covers SharePoint and enterprise from the perspective of a business analyst. In, “Increased Productivity Means Focusing on Adoption,” on AIIM, Buckley draws an analogy between the increased productivity in the manufacturing sector, and subsequent failure to increase demand, and the same scenario unfolding in the IT world.
Buckley sums up the argument:
“Just as our economy moved from an agricultural to an industrial market, and from industrial to an information-based marketing, within the world of the Information Worker this increase in productivity is allowing organizations to move from a hardware-centric view (where IT pulls cables, stands up servers, maintains those servers) to a business intelligence and decision support view. Where are the business opportunities today? And where does SharePoint fit? There is a gap between productivity increases and resource utilization decreases, and here are three business impacts that I believe will become more visible: 1) Repurposed roles 2) Increased reliance on services 3) Focus on user adoption.”
So how does SharePoint fit in and how can enterprise solutions in general respond? Smart third-party solutions are one way to increase efficiency all the more. A solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze can provide an organization with an intuitive interface and intelligence search results. Working as a stand-alone solution or as a compliment to SharePoint, Mindbreeze can free information workers from enterprise customization and maintenance leaving them time to focus on business analyst functions.
“Our information pairing technology makes you unbeatable. Information pairing brings enterprise information and information in the Cloud together. This gives you an overall image of a company’s knowledge. This is the basis for your competitive advantage. In this way you can act quickly, reliably, dynamically and profitably in all business matters.”
Buckley argues that business analyst numbers will grow as the maintenance functions of IT workers continue to decline. Organizations can begin to focus on complimenting smart business decisions with smart technology decisions, instead of spinning wheels in an attempt to keep on-site servers and solutions running. Sounds like a good trade-off.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Android Fragmentation Not
April 5, 2012
In the iPhone versus Android mobile battle, Android may be about to suffer a huge loss.Tech News World recently reported on the issue of fragmentation causing Android developers to flee in the article “Is Fragmentation Breaking the Android Dev’s Will?”
According to the article, due to the continued fragmentation of its operating system, developers are starting to lose interest in developing apps for Android. Based on information derived from a survey conducted by Appcelerator and IDC at the beginning of the new year, Android phone app development fell by nearly five percentage points over the past quarter to about 79 percent and interest in Android tablets fell just over 2 percent to about 66 percent.
The article states:
Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) own figures show that many different versions of Android are current being used. Google statistics regarding the number of active devices accessing Google Play over two weeks ending March 5 found that 62 percent ran Gingerbread, or Android 2.3. Another roughly 25 percent ran Froyo, or Android 2.2. Eclair, or Android 2.1, was used by 6.6 percent of the devices.
We get it. Fragmentation means homogenous just like “meaningful use” means better health care.
Jasmine Ashton, April 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PLM Might be the Definition of Innovation
April 5, 2012
Manufacturing has turned to product lifecycle management (PLM) to increase productivity and product development. Recently, Jos Voskuil’s weblog explored “PLM and Innovation.” He says those two words are used “as Siamese twins, but no one explains explicitly why they are connected.” He explores three different ways PLM supports innovation – invention discovery, support selection for the right invention and support new product introduction.
Companies usually look outside their walls to find inventions. Voskuil believes that companies “can stimulate invention by implementing the modern way of PLM and not use PLM as an extended PDM.” Secondly, PLM helps innovation by “assisting companies to select the right opportunities that can be the next big opportunity for these companies.” Finally, Voskuil says that PLM helps can “bring this opportunity to the market as fast as possible, with the right quality and the right manufacturing definition.”
“A famous PLM one-liner is for PLM is: PLM – doing it right the first time, it refers more to the fact that a product introduction process is done only once and with the right quality. It does not mean iterations to improve or change the product scope are not needed.”
Today’s PLM is the definition of innovation for numerous industries across the board. Companies like Autodesk and Inforbix are totally changing the way manufactures handle their product development. Inforbix as revolutionized the way companies find, reuse and share their product data. That seems to be the textbook definition of innovation.
Jennifer Wensink, April 4, 2012
Google in the World of Academic Research
April 5, 2012
Librarians, teachers, and college professors all press their students not to use Google to research their projects, papers, and homework, but it is a dying battle. All students have to do is type in a few key terms and millions of results are displayed. The average student or person, for that matter, is not going to scour through every single result. If they do not find what they need, they simply rethink their initial key words and hit the search button again.
The Hindu recently wrote about, “Of Google and Scholarly Search,” the troubles researchers face when they only use Google and makes several suggestions for alternate search engines and databases.
Google has tried to combat their “low academic quality” results with Google Scholar and Annotum. Google Scholar is the equivalent of a regular academic database, except they don’t always return full text articles. Annotum takes a different approach by changing the search configuration all together. It is a scholarly blog platform, where experts can share their knowledge without being bogged down by personal opinion, rants, and other social networking content (Annotum was preceded by Knol, but Google is eliminating that service).
There are other tools to help the wayward researcher. The search engines Hakia, Kngine, Sensebot, and DuckDuckGo use semantic search technology instead of the usual Google formula. While they are not strictly research search engines, they do provide you with a more logical approach to search than returning every web site where the key term pops up. One semantic search engine that eliminates the usual everyman search is Deepdyve. You won’t be able to look for pop culture references with it, but it will give you more authoritative sources than Google.
If one needs information specifically on the sciences, Web of Science and SciVerce ScienceDirect are university -approved databases that host millions of articles from scientific journals, abstracts, track research data, and connect with other researchers. Another topic that is of current interest in the IT world is patents. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all racing to create the next big technological craze, but they research patents to make sure their competitors haven’t gotten there first. Micropatent, SumoBrain, and Relecura are the top patent databases on the web used by industry and business heads.
While Google may provide the easiest way to access information, it is hardly the best for research. Use the above search engines and web sites to improve research quality and not just receive quantity from Google.
Whitney Grace, April 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attivio Identifies a “Not Right”
April 5, 2012
Attivio Claims “Something Is Not Right” In Unified Information Access
Turn back to your yesteryears and take a cue from Attivio’s blog that uses famous children’s literature character, Madeline, to explain the problem with hard evidence vs. gut instinct: “ ‘Something Is Not Right’—Don’t Ignore Your Gut When Analyzing Information.” The author Mike Urbonas uses Miss Clavel, Madeline’s caregiver, famous line about trusting her instincts when something is wrong with her charge. Urbonas relates that in hospitals, healthcare professionals are worried about notifying doctors when they sense something is wrong with their cardiac patients because they not have hard data. If they had gone with their gut, more patients would have survived.
We totally agree with Urbonas when he leads into a unified information access argument:
“What I find very exciting is that unified information access (UIA) is playing a vital role in empowering managers and leaders to connect those dots between data and other silos of information to realize those critical new insights. UIA integrates, joins and presents all related information — structured data and unstructured content to complete the informational picture and significantly expand what organizations “know” to determine with confidence whether “Something is not right.”
This creative metaphor breaks up the monotony of most IT articles, but our favorite is Ikanow’s open source approach to analytics. Our concern is that as systems get improved “training wheels”, the rider may not recognize a risky situation.
Whitney Grace, April 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Datameer Has a New Analytics Toy
April 5, 2012
According to Marketwatch.com, Datameer, Inc, a provider of Apache built end user analytics solutions, announced the release Datameer 1.4 in “Datameer Releases a Major New Version of Analytics Platform. Datameer 1.4” improves functionality in data management, user and data security, and expanded support for data source adaptors, Hadoop, Cloudera, and IBM. We learned:
The new features in Datameer 1.4 demonstrate that Datameer is committed to delivering what customers want with an emphasis on quality and ease of use,” stated David Cornell, Software Development Manager at SophosLabs. “We are particularly excited to see support for partitioning which will dramatically enhance report generation performance.
Datameer 1.4 was released to meet the growing demands of the company’s clients. As the only Apache Hadoop analytics solution, Datameer builds solutions to aid businesses in linear scalability and cost-effectiveness to analyze/, integrate, and visualize structured and unstructured data. Datameer is a company that relies on open source software and is working hard to make a name for themselves in the business world.
The hook for this new release may be performance. Speed, more than fancy analytics, is becoming more important.
Whitney Grace, April 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Netflix of Magazines and How Usage Will Really Work
April 5, 2012
I read “Finally, a Reason to Read Magazines on a Tablet.” The idea seems like a quite fresh one. A group of publishers have teamed up to pool high-value content. Users can buy the content. The idea is that aggregation of full text and a flat fee of $10 or $15 per month will generate revenue. I have not been privy to the discussions, but I have a hunch that the notion of “big money” and possibly the idea of “saving the magazine business” may have crossed the minds of the folks who came up with this 21st century idea. You can read the AllThingsD article and get the nitty gritty.
I want to focus on a fact I learned in my years of working with content in online form. Some of these ideas will strike most of the people under the age of 40 as silly, but the comments below are based on real life experience with commercial information products delivered in digital form via electronic media. I invite comments, but I want to capture the basics before I zoom past this “revolutionary” idea. I have pulled some ideas from my confidential report, “The Physics of Information,” prepared for a government agency a number of years ago. (Some related content is available when you search Beyond Search for “mysteries of online”; for example, Mysteries of Online 3: Free versus Fee Information.”)
The collision of reality and for-fee, high value information services spawns a large number of unanticipated costs. Revenue is usually inadequate to cover spikes, pay overhead, invest in additional development, and expand the user base. Unlike print magazines, digital content is slippery and tough to make pay in the way a successful magazine did in 1975.
First, in any aggregation of electronic content, there will be a variant of the 80-20 rule. In the digital world, four to seven percent of the available content attracts attention. If you have a back file of 100,000 stories and a flow of five new stories a day, the most recent content attracts the majority of the clicks. The “long tail” is an interesting concept, but in the world of paying for digital information, the fresh content and the most recent content has value. Older content for the majority of those seeking information is “nice to have” and will be rarely if ever clicked upon for a fee. As a result, when I am asked, “Do we build a back file of our high value content?”, my answer is, “No.” The money comes from the now content. Back file content unless easily automated or very cheap to acquire is not worth the hassle. Better to put the resources into the now content.
Autodesk Credits the Cloud with PLM Growth
April 4, 2012
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is starting to take stride. Its growth may not have been instant, but it is now catching fire. Autodesk PLM 360 launched in March and “Autodesk Uses Cloud Computing to ‘Fix’ PLM.” Robert Kross, Autodesk’s senior VP of design, lifecycle and simulation, says that PLM “is still fundamentally immature,” but the cloud will “finally help PLM fulfill its promise to the enterprise.”
Autodesk PLM 360 is “designed to go beyond PDM’s engineering focus and bring together all aspects of a product lifecycle…on all platforms.” Kross also added that “it works with existing enterprise business models and practices” and “the cloud makes it relatively simple to set up trial installations.” The cost has also become manageable.
“According to Kross, a typical PLM installation can approach $5 million in the first year. PLM 360 clocks in under $300,000. Even if the product can’t match traditional functionality, cutting costs by an order of magnitude can open up the category to many more potential customers and use cases.”
As the cloud grows, so will PLM. It will also allow other PLM companies to break out of the shadow of their bigger competition. Take for example Inforbix. By utilizing the cloud, their software has increased the value of product data and improved productivity. They have revolutionized the way companies find, reuse and share product data. PLM is on the move and will finally deliver as promised.
Jennifer Wensink, April 4, 2012
Google Does eDiscovery
April 4, 2012
The freethinking Google has decided to launch an eDiscovery app to help reduce the cost of finding and capturing data for litigation. CBR writes about the new app in, “Google Adds eDiscovery Option to Apps Platform.” Google’s new app dubbed Vault allows businesses to preserve and identify information for legal purposes. Once the data is saved in the Vault a “legal hold” is placed on it, meaning it cannot be modified. We learned:
Vault helps protect your business with easy-to-use search so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations. With an instant-on functionality and availability of your data a few clicks away, Vault provides access to all of your Gmail and on-the-record chats and can provide significant savings to your business over the traditional costs of litigation and eDiscovery,” Jack Halprin, Google’s head of eDiscovery, added.
Vault uses the same architecture as other Google Business Apps and it can easily be added to clients’ accounts for another $5/month. Vault can also record IM messages and G-mail accounts, but it cannot capture any data outside the Google platform. It does prove that Google is dedicated to expanding their capabilities, especially their cloud-based software. Google has been lauded as the business model of the IT world with a jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt approach to business, but now Google is serving enterprise niches and it suggests a more disciplined approach to the enterprise market. Will a suit and tie be next?
Whitney Grace, April 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Approach SharePoint as a Business Analyst
April 4, 2012
The SharePoint Expert Blog features Christian Buckley and his take on how most organizations would benefit from viewing SharePoint through the lens of a business analyst. In, “The Role of a Business Analyst in SharePoint,” Buckley states that organizations rarely approach their SharePoint installation with the same level of intentionality as their other ventures.
“In presentations on migration and planning best practices for SharePoint, I often remark that every new SharePoint project begins as a Business Analyst activity. What is the role of the Business Analyst, and how does it fit into a successful SharePoint strategy? While there are different kinds of Business Analysts . . . the core functions of this role remain fairly consistent . . . Now extend this understanding to how you staff your SharePoint deployment. Experience has shown that few organizations properly staff their administration team, much less provide the SharePoint team with a dedicated — or even a part-time — Business Analyst resource. SharePoint is generally grossly understaffed.”
Buckley goes on to state that many would overestimate SharePoint’s ease of use:
“I would venture that a lack of understanding of key business processes, and the gaps between what SharePoint provides out-of-the-box and what it is capable of doing is at the heart of most end user adoption issues.”
So in order to get more functionality out of SharePoint, more staffing and attention should be devoted. If not, as Buckley said, “what it (SharePoint) is capable of doing” will never be discovered. But perhaps there is a third option, a third-party option like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Intuitive and ready to use out-of-the-box, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can supplement an existing SharePoint installation, or completely replace it. The suite of solutions engineering by Fabasoft address the issues of today, including mobility, efficiency, information pairing, and the Cloud.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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