Business Process Management: Bit Player or Buzz Word?
November 7, 2011
I spoke with one of the goslings who produces content for our different information services. We were reviewing a draft of a write up, and I reacted negatively to the source document and to the wild and crazy notions that find their way into the discussions about “problems” and “challenges” in information technology.
In enterprise search and content management, flag waving is more important than solving customers’ problems. Economic pressure seems to exponentiate the marketing clutter. Are companies with resources “too big to flail””? Nope.
Here’s the draft, and I have put in bold face the parts that caught my attention and push back:
As the amount of data within a business or industry grows the question of what to do with it arises. The article, “Business Process Management and Mastering Data in the Enterprise“, on Capgemini’s Web site explains how Business Process Management (BPM) is not the ideal means for managing data.
According the article as more and more operations are used to store data the process of synchronizing the data becomes increasingly difficult.
As for using BPM to do the job, the article explains,
While BPM tools have the infrastructure to do hold a data model and integrate to multiple core systems, the process of mastering the data can become complex and, as the program expands across ever more systems, the challenges can become unmanageable. In my view, BPMS solutions with a few exceptions are not the right place to be managing core data[i]. At the enterprise level MDM solutions are for more elegant solutions designed specifically for this purpose.
The answer to this ever-growing problem was happened upon by combining knowledge from both a data perspective and a process perspective. The article suggests that a Target Operating Model (TOM) would act as a rudder for the projects aimed at synchronizing data. After that was in place a common information model be created with enterprise definitions of the data entities which then would be populated by general attributes fed by a single process project.
While this is just one man’s answer to the problem of data, it is a start. Regardless of how businesses approach the problem it remains constant–process management alone is not efficient enough to meet the demands of data management.
Here’s my concern. First, I think there are a number of concepts, shibboleths, and smoke screens flying, floating, and flapping. The conceptual clutter is crazy. The “real” journalists dutifully cover these “signals”. My hunch is that most of the folks who like videos gobble these pronouncements like Centrum multivitamins. The idea is that one doze with lots of “stuff” will prevent information technology problems from wrecking havoc on an organization.
Three observations:
First, I think that in the noise, quite interesting and very useful approaches to enterprise information management can get lost. Two good examples. Polyspot in France and Digital Reasoning in the U.S. Both companies have approaches which solve some tough problems. Polyspot offers and infrastructure, search, and apps approach. Digital Reasoning delivers next-generation numerical recipes, what the company calls entity based analytics. Baloney like Target Operating Models do not embrace these quite useful technologies.
Second, the sensitivity of indexes and blogs to public relations spam is increasing. The perception that indexing systems are “objective” is fascinating, just incorrect. What happens then is that a well heeled firm can output a sequence of spam news releases and then sit back and watch the “real” journalists pick up the arguments and ideas. I wrote about one example of this in “A Coming Dust Up between Oracle and MarkLogic?”
Third, I am considering a longer essai about the problem of confusing Barbara, Desdemona’s mother’s maid, with Othello. Examples include confusing technical methods or standards with magic potions; for instance, taxonomies as a “fix” for lousy findability and search, semantics as a work around for poorly written information, metatagging as a solution to context free messages, etc. What’s happening is that a supporting character, probably added by the compilers of Shakespeare’s First Folio edition is made into the protagonist. Since many recent college graduates don’t know much about Othello, talking about Barbara as the possible name of the man who played the role in the 17th century is a waste of time. The response I get when I mention “Barbara” when discussing the play is, “Who?” This problem is surfacing in discussions of technology. XML, for example, is not a rabbit from a hat. XML is a way to describe the rabbit-hat-magician content and slice and dice the rabbit-hat-magician without too many sliding panels and dim lights.
What is the relation of this management and method malarkey? Sales, gentle reader, sales. Hyperbole, spam, and jargon are Teflon to get a deal.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Activating Keyword Search in SharePoint 2010
November 7, 2011
SharePoint and Its Sometimes Interesting Costs
November 3, 2011
SharePoint is touted as the ultimate solution to content management and collaboration for enterprises. Microsoft, however, never discusses the costs associated with their software, except for how it’s cost effective and overtime will save your business money. But is that true? Redmondmag.com posted an enlightening article about the hidden costs involved in a SharePoint project, “Study: SharePoint Costs High Due to Inadequate Skills.”
A study conducted by the Azaleos Corp. discovered that the average cost to run SharePoint per user is $46/month. Using Microsoft Exchange proved to be cheaper at $15-15/month per user. SharePoint users also cited downtime as the most common problem.
“The downtime mostly stemmed from hardware errors or mistakes made by IT team members. Those problems caused average monthly management costs for SharePoint to double to around $90 per user per month. Almost half (43 percent) of study respondents pointed to “a lack of administrator skills, training, and knowledge as an inhibitor to efficiently leveraging SharePoint.”
SharePoint is still a young piece of software with a manifest destiny for its future. Its problems are many, but there are a lot of third party solutions to resolve them. At the end of the article, Azaleos Corp. advertises it’s AzaleosX app to help increase uptime.
We believe that you may want to take a close look at the cost effective search and content processing solution from SurfRay. Contain costs and improve user satisfaction with one snap in for SharePoint.
Whitney Grace, November 3, 2011
SurfRay
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November 2, 2011
Protected: More Products for SharePoint Governance Problems
November 1, 2011
Protected: The Top Fortune 500 SharePoint Users
October 31, 2011
2012: Enterprise Search Yields to Metadata?
October 30, 2011
Oh, my. The search dragon has been killed by metadata.
You might find yourself on an elevator ready to get off on a specific floor. The rest of your trip will start from that point and that point only. The same is true for learning, conversing, actually just about anything. We all have a particular place we want to enter the conversation. MSDN’s Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog’s recent posting on “Taxonomy: Starting from Scratch” was a breath of fresh air in the way it addressed anyone–no matter what floor they needed.
For the novices to Managed Metadata Service, a service providing tools to foster a rich corporate taxonomy, the article recommends a starting point: Introducing Enterprise Metadata Management
According to the article. The more seasoned users are reminded to point their browsers towards import capabilities. Of course, there are more specific needs, and links to go with them, addressed too.
The article recommends the following for the clients who need a comprehensive understanding of both common and specific corporate terms. The author Ryan Duguid states:
“The General Business Taxonomy consists of around 500 terms describing common functional areas that exist in most businesses. The General Business Taxonomy can be imported in to the SharePoint 2010 term store within minutes and provides a great starting point for customers looking to build a corporate vocabulary and take advantage of the Managed Metadata Service.”
Overall, this article is worth keeping tucked away for a day when you might need information on WAND, SharePoint, or metadata and taxonomy in general because of the directness and the accessible next steps the variety of links offer.
Megan Feil, October 30, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint Search Best Practices
October 27, 2011
SharePoint search tips are of particular interest to us here at Beyond Search. We strive to sort the chafe from the wheat and sometimes turning to the source material is the best way to do that.
We noted a quite useful series of best practice articles from Microsoft’s own TechNet Web site. Navigate to “Best Practices for Search in SharePoint Server 2010.” The article explains the best methods for enterprise search and it applies to both SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Search Server 2010.
What we like about this article is that it outlines the best methods without beating around the bush. As with many SharePoint plans, there’s a simple to follow list:
- Plan the deployment
- Start with a well-configured infrastructure
- Manage access by using Windows security groups or by using role claims for forms-based authentication or authentication using a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) security token
- Defragment the search database
- Monitor SQL Server latency
- Test the crawling and querying subsystems after you change any configuration or apply updates
- Review the antivirus policy.
Each step is given its own section with additional information that goes into further detail about how to deploy the ideas.
What we noted about this article is that it is an official Microsoft document.
We want to include our own best practice. When it comes to making findability brings smiles to SharePoint users’ faces, we rely on SurfRay Ontolica to deliver SharePoint 2010 search.
Whitney Grace, October 27, 2011
SurfRay
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Google and the Perils of Posting
October 21, 2011
I don’t want to make a big deal out of an simple human mistake from a button click. I just had eye surgery, and it is a miracle that I can [a] find my keyboard and [b] make any function on my computers work.
However, I did notice this item this morning and wanted to snag it before it magically disappeared due to mysterious computer gremlins. The item in question is “Last Week I Accidentally Posted”, via Google Plus at this url. I apologize for the notation style, but Google Plus posts come with the weird use of the “+” sign which is a killer when running queries on some search systems. Also, there is no title, which means this is more of a James Joyce type of writing than a standard news article or even a blog post from the addled goose in Harrod’s Creek.
To get some context you can read my original commentary in “Google Amazon Dust Bunnies.” My focus in that write up is squarely on the battle between Google and Amazon, which I think is more serious confrontation that the unemployed English teachers, aging hippies turned consultant, and the failed yet smarmy Web masters who have reinvented themselves as “search experts” think.
Believe me, Google versus Amazon is going to be interesting. If my research is on the money, the problems between Google and Amazon will escalate to and may surpass the tension that exists between Google and Oracle, Google and Apple, and Google and Viacom. (Well, Viacom may be different because that is a personal and business spat, not just big companies trying to grab the entire supply of apple pies in the cafeteria.)
In the Dust Bunnies write up, I focused on the management context of the information in the original post and the subsequent news stories. In this write up, I want to comment on four aspects of this second post about why Google and Amazon are both so good, so important, and so often misunderstood. If you want me to talk about the writer of these Google Plus essays, stop reading. The individual’s name which appears on the source documents is irrelevant.
1. Altering or Idealizing What Really Happened
I had a college professor, Dr. Philip Crane who told us in history class in 1963, “When Stalin wanted to change history, he ordered history textbooks to be rewritten.” I don’t know if the anecdote is true or not. Dr. Crane went on to become a US congressman, and you know how reliable those folks’ public statements are. What we have in the original document and this apologia is a rewriting of history. I find this interesting because the author could use other methods to make the content disappear. My question, “Why not?” And, “Why revisit what was a pretty sophomoric tirade involving a couple of big companies?”
2, Suppressing Content with New Content
One of the quirks of modern indexing systems such as Baidu, Jike, and Yandex is that once content is in the index, it can persist. As more content on a particular topic accretes “around” an anchor document, the document becomes more findable. What I find interesting is that despite the removal of the original post the secondary post continues to “hook” to discussions of that original post. In fact, the snippet I quoted in “Dust Bunnies” comes from a secondary source. I have noted and adapted to “good stuff” disappearing as a primary document. The only evidence of a document’s existence are secondary references. As these expand, then the original item becomes more visible and more difficult to suppress. In short, the author of the apologia is ensuring the findability of the gaffe. Fascinating to me.
3. Amazon: A Problem for Google
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