Archive for 2008

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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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Analytics and RIAs – Which Ones Matter?

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Tracking meaningful performance indicators for your rich Internet application (RIA) is a hotly debated subject. Since RIAs break the traditional page model, the common values of page views and page visits are no longer relevant. But then the question arises – What is it that you should measure? Well, the key is to look at the objective of your application and to break down what numbers really mean something to its success. This recent short article from Robert Hoekman, Jr. an interaction designer, brings up some good points about metrics.

With these thoughts in mind, look for an analytics package that will help you track the figures that matter. There are a number of solutions on the market, but many of the seasoned RIA experts point to Omniture and Core Metrics as the two best options for tracking RIA metrics. Omniture is offering a free webinar titled “How to Build, Measure, and Profit using RIA on Your Site” that may be helpful for defining your key performance metrics.

Over at Inside RIA, Andre Charland has kicked off a discussion about metrics for your RIAs. I’d encourage you to join in and voice your opinion.

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Retailers Embrace RIAs

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

It looks like retailers are starting to see the true potential of rich Internet applications (RIAs). During last week’s ACCM conference in Orlando, I attended an interesting session about “Getting the best ROI from Rich Media”. The session looked at some of the key trends in retail and the predictions that industry analysts are making about the rise of rich content on eCommerce sites. Many of the stats presented focused on the number of retailers adding alternate images, video, and zoom features to their pages. However, one surprising figure that was mentioned was that 69% of the top 100 retailers are planning to add RIAs to their site in the coming year (taken from the Forrester State of Online Retail 2008 report). This includes technology such as product selectors, configurators, wardrobe tools, and more. This is a huge increase over last year. It seems that the early results from retailers that made the jump, combined with consumer reaction have caused retailers to step up to the plate.

If you are interested in learning more about Rich eCommerce, register for our free webinar An Introduction to Rich eCommerce, scheduled for Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 10 AM.

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The State of The RIA Nation

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I figured I’d post a quick summary on the “state of the nation” in regards to RIAs since it has been a very active couple of months.

Kevin Whinnery has an interesting blog titled Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang for Your Buck?. Interesting because I agree with his analysis: there is no best RIA tool out there, only trade-offs.

As I had mentioned in Spry 1.7 is Coming Soon AJAX and Flex are now considered complementary: the former specializes in moderately rich interfaces, but may lead to expensive Write Once, Debug Everywhere projects, whereas the latter allows for more expressive interfaces at the cost of surrendering part of your [software's] freedom to private interests.

On the topic of MVC-ish frameworks (as referred to by Kevin Whinnery), it is worth noting that Flex too can be a very efficient MVC development framework with Cairngorm, but most particularly with PureMVC which Laurent Brigaut, INM’s Director of R&D, will speak about at Webmaniacs tomorrow.

RIA War Is Brewing is another interesting and recent article by Jim Rapoza. Although I perceive this competition as more of a Socratic dialectic applied to the business world than a true battle, Jim converges on the same conclusion as this Blog consistently promotes: real competition is now between Adobe and Microsoft. Whether other RIA tools can be categorized as Lada‘s or Aston Martin‘s, one way or another, they are marginal and only suited for niche applications.

Once online and offline environments are mastered for desktop computers, laptops and kiosks, the next natural step for RIA technologies is the propagation to mobile devices. Tablet technologies have a very promising future but are still embryonic. Thus the smartphone is the next logical platform of choice.

Very interesting plans are unfolding on this new frontier with Microsoft demonstrating serious progress with Silverlight and Adobe coming out of its 20th Century bi-standard policies (Flash Player and Flash Lite Player) with the Open Screen Project. Google fosters the Open Handset Alliance with the Android project, and Sun is behind its JavaFX developers, but neither will deliver truly rich applications, at least not in the foreseeable future. But this is a topic for another day, and another posting.

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Webinar: Creating your Corporate eLibrary

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

After our popular “Best Practices for Building an Online eLibrary” webinar, we had many inquiries about how specific elements of the content applied in a corporate library environment. As such, we are offering a new webinar targeted specifically toward corporate librarians entitled “Creating Your Corporate eLibrary“.

This introductory session is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 1 PM Eastern Time, and registration is free.

For more information about our webinars or to register, visit http://www.INM.com/webinars/.

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Best Practices in Software Development Are Not

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

In a rather provocative talk at Project World 2008 last week, IBM’s Practice Leader, Scott Ambler, shared a secret: He admits that accepted best practices in software development are no longer best practices.

“Writing a detailed requirement spec up-front is a worst practice, despite being considered a best practice for the longest time,” said Ambler. “When you do this, you are building to specs, as opposed to building to what people actually need.”

Everything in this industry is now pointing to the same direction. As such, developers must:

  • establish a long-term vision but design for the short term
  • release projects in small iterations
  • make project components as independent as possible from each other
  • and, first and foremost, connect every feature to a stakeholder’s needs

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