Archive for July, 2008

The Year to Come – Looking Forward

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

In my last post, I took a moment to look back over the past year to see what changed. After looking back, it’s time now to look forward and predict what will happen over the year to come.

What’s in store over the next 12 months? Well, I see a number of big changes brewing on a few different fronts:

  • Cloud Computing/SaaS – We’ve written about this topic for the past year, and it seems to really be gaining traction over the last few months. Enterprises are embracing hosted services and software as a service (SaaS) as a way to become more responsive and to focus energies on core business. They will come to realize that entrusting some data and control to an SaaS is bliss as SaaS’ economy of scale allows for a level of security and reliability beyond what a modest in-house IT team can deliver. I predict that we will see greater acceptance of this in the coming year and will see many enterprises openly embrace SaaS for core business applications.
  • RIAs – Rich Internet applications have been one of the most popular topics in tech media this year. Over the next year, I predict that we will start to see a shift away from general RIAs and toward different categories of solutions such as Rich eCommerce, Rich BI, etc…. I also think that there will be big advances in the tools used to create RIAs. We’ve already seem previews of Thermo, but I suspect that this won’t be the only solution bridging the gap between developer and designer. The official launch of Silverlight 2.0 should add some much needed competition in the rich web content space. RIAs will also migrate deeper into the enterprise, with adoption expanding beyond B2C applications. RIAs will be pivotal for internal enterprise applications, as well as B2B.
  • Mobile – With nearly double the growth last year in mobile browsing, I predict that we are getting close to a big change in the way users interact with their mobile devices. This change will vastly be driven by better user interfaces and enhanced usability, but also by better display and battery technologies. Context-sensitive interactions (based on location, time of day, usage pattern, ambient attributes, etc.) will be a very hot topic.

So far it’s shaping up to be an exciting next 12 months. What do you think is in store? We welcome your comments and predictions.

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One Year Later – Looking Back over the Last 12 Months

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

In preparing for the one year anniversary of Impact, I decided to write two posts – this one, which looks back over what’s happened in the past year, and a second post which will go up tomorrow that will look forward to what we can expect in the coming twelve months.

Since July 2007, there have been a number of big changes in our space. Here are my thoughts and comments on a few of the key ones:

  • RIAs – This was a banner year for progress on the RIA front. Adoption catapulted forward, new tools and technologies like Adobe AIR, and Silverlight were introduced, barriers were broken in terms of content indexing, and many new tools for development were introduced. We also started to see RIAs adopted by enterprise for mission critical business applications like dashboards. The improved user experience and productivity benefits are being recognized and embraced by early adopters.
  • SaaS – In the past year, there has been a huge increase in acceptance of SaaS by enterprises and their users. Decision makers are starting to realize that flying from New York to London does not require the purchase of an aircraft, but just the “licensing” of a seat for the duration of the flight. We’ve even seen the emergence of PaaS.
  • Mobile – Few can doubt the impact of the iPhone, but it alone is not responsible for the growth in mobile browsing. According to AdMob, the number of internet web users in the US grew by 10 million, to reach 40 million, and mobile web usage has grown by over 100% in the past year.

On a more personal note, we’ve seen many changes here at INM as well. Over the past year, we’ve really beefed up our team and have added a number of key resources. We’ve created an in-house team for User Experience Design and have encouraged a number of our developers to pursue industry certifications. We’ve gained significant experience in working on ground-breaking RIAs, and have brought in a number of really exciting new clients.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my predictions on the year to come.

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Happy Anniversary Impact

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

It seems hard to believe, but it was one year ago today that we put up our first post and officially launched Impact. In the past year, we’ve added 55 posts on a number of different subjects. Some of our most popular ones include:

I hope you’ve found the blog interesting and helpful and that you’ve subscribed to either our RSS Feed or our Email Notifications to stay up-to-date on our latest posts. We welcome comments below or you can send feedback by email to Andrea@INM.com.

For the next year, we plan to expand our team of bloggers to introduce you to more members of the INM team and to add in a little more news to our mix. Stay tuned.

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The Changing Face of BI

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

In the previous article of this series, we looked at how changes in the enterprise are creating a need for BI. In this final article of the series, we will look how BI has changed to meet the needs of the new market it addresses, from the challenges it creates to the evolution of the technology.

BI in its current form is a relatively new market that comes with a number of challenges, some which are technical and others which are less so. Some challenges include:

  • Organizing a company’s data into a data warehouse
  • Establishing and enforcing standards for the new BI solution
  • Managing security and compliance
  • Traning staff on the operation of new sytems
  • Managing the cultural shift in an organization at all levels (executive, management, and staff)

A recent article from Internetnews.com does a nice job of summing up how more and more organizations are looking for solutions that move beyond the deep analysis of metrics through custom built software programs, and are opting for more dynamic and readily accessible solutions that are always available through a web-browser.

The article goes on to discuss how organizations are leveraging rich Internet application (RIA) technology and Software as a Service (SaaS) to create BI solutions that are more competitive and provide ready access to metrics at any time. The benefits of large scale data manipulation, strong visualization tools, and quick updates are tempting executives toward more packaged RIA-based solutions that are offered as a service.

Whether your organization subscribes to the school of thought that a custom solution provides the best strategy for BI, or that working with a CGI or Accenture type consultant brings the best value, I would encourage you to contact us to discuss your project and how we can help improve the delivery of information in the most accurate, relevant and appropriate way. I also welcome your comments on this article series. Please feel free to post them below or to email me at Andrea@INM.com.

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What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

There’s been quite a bit of news lately on Business Intelligence (BI) and its changing role in the enterprise. All of which has inspired me to write an article series on the topic. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be looking deeper into BI, covering what it is, its role in the shifting enterprise, and how new tools and technologies on the market are changing its face.

Let’s start with an introduction and definition of what we mean by Business Intelligence. According to Wikipedia, Business Intelligence is defined as “the technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information for the purpose of supporting better business decision making.”

In the past, this term was typically associated with the elite financial markets, but today it has become a common place term that is interchangeably used to reference metrics and reporting broadly within organizations. BI has moved from something that concerned only a few select organizations, to something that now concerns most businesses. Its influence has also propagated within the organization. In the early years of BI, it was only the senior management that was concerned with performance. Today, the shift in how organizations operate has made BI a topic of interest at multiple levels within the organization.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, where we will look at “The Enterprise Shift and the Role of BI”

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The Enterprise Shift and the Role of BI

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

In the first article of this series, we defined Business Intelligence (BI) and looked a bit at its history and current day role. In this instalment, we are going to look at the changes in the enterprise and how BI’s role within the organization has changed.

Let’s start with a look at how management used to function, years ago, management was primarily based on the pyramid style, with a few white collar workers leading a greater number of subordinates. The power within an organization sat with the few at the top of the pyramid, where managers made decisions and told employers what to do as a result of privileged data that they had access to.

Today, many organizations have shifted and have become much flatter and now operate with a management style that more closely resembles a series of interconnected circles. With this shift comes a change in power. The power is now more evenly distributed with managers and employees both having access to the information, technology and knowledge to make decisions. Suddenly BI has moved from the boardroom, to the mailroom, to the field and has become a critical tool for running a business.

BI is used to provide immediate feedback and critical data for employees to make decisions at all levels, from the boardroom to the factory floor.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this article, where we will address “The Changing Face of BI”, including a look at the technologies that are enabling BI to adapt to its new role.

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Adobe Improves SEO with Special Version of Flash Player

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Adobe announced today that it has made a special version of Flash Player available to Google and Yahoo that drastically improves search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF). This new version will uncover information that search engines could not previously access, providing more relevant search rankings for all of the rich Internet applications (RIAs) that leverage the Adobe Flash Player.

This announcement means that organizations that have previously spent significant time and money to build a work-around solution to SEO-enable their RIAs no longer have to take any special steps to do so. Application developers and content producers can simply create their content in SWF and the search engines can read the attributes directly.

Search engine optimization has been a major hurdle for many retailers in moving toward an RIA-driven site. This announcement makes it that much easier.

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