Enterprise 2.0 Essentials

Microsoft Azure - Contribute or Cannibalize?

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:56:00 +0000

While the discussions between Microsoft and SaleForce fans continues to heat up, I think the announcement of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services is a good sign for customers. Especially, for IT shops and product vendors that are committed to .net technologies this is great news. This also means customers will now have more choices in selecting their Cloud provider. For Microsoft, the success of this offering really hinge on creating and sustaining a profitable business model for Cloud services.
For one, this is a timely move on Microsoft front to capture its share of the growing Cloud services market. With the increasing economic pressures, more and more enterprises are now considering SaaS and Cloud services to enable business agility. Clearly, Azure is a excellent attempt to align Microsoft products to these emerging customer needs (capital vs. operational cost, business agility) and technology trends (connectedness and flexibility).

Second, just like Google and Amazon, Microsoft invested heavily in Windows Live infrastructure for consumer markets. The recent Cloud offering could be a natural extension to these massive infrastructure investments enabling Microsoft to further capitalize on these investments, learnings and expertise.

In addition to the new market opportunities, Azure platform also brings the inherent risk of cannibalizing existing on-premise products to Microsoft. The pull out of SAP SaaS and inhibitions of Oracle to be a SaaS/Cloud provider demonstrates the serious impediments the product companies face to takeup dual role as a Cloud provider (Google, Amazon) and Cloud supplier (Dell, HP). Especially, the competing nature of these two offerings mean winning more business for one product may turn out as losing business for the other. The second risk is monetization part. So far, only few players are able to turn SaaS offering into a profitable business model. With Microsoft Live investments yet to make money, how soon Azure offering will be profitable is anybody’s guess at this point.

More importantly, the network effect of eco system on SaaS providers is clearly evident in great success of few SaaS leaders. One example is partnership between Workday and SalesForce.com. I noticed that strategic partnerships of this kind help to increase customer confidence in the overall eco system and attract more customers towards the eco system. I think Microsoft need to do more than standing next to SAP to insert itself into the Cloud ecosystem. It needs to establish strategic partnerships with leaders and strong players in this niche to establish strong base in SaaS/cloud ecosystem.

Debate on Social Media vs. Knowledge Management

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:10:00 +0000

Vekat Rao spurred the debate on Knowledge Management (KM) and Social Media (SM) philosophies with his thought provoking article Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War. He reasoned that as much as IT senior leaders think KM and SM are loosely aligned concepts, there are fundamental technical, cultural and philosophical differences between Knowledge Management and Social Media. While KM is centered on predefined charters, expected value and governance, the themes and charters of SM endogenously evolve with group behavior and opinion leaders naturally emerge as a result of the group behavior itself. He points that KM is an unsuccessful attempt to dictate how the world should be, while SM is a real attempt to figure out how it is. Venkat predicts that KM will eventually die and SM will evolve, perhaps by incorporating some best of KM.

While I agree with Venkat’s explanation of SM evolution and its applications in enterprises, I am not in total agreement that KM will eventually die. In my experience so far, I noticed profound applications, driven by underlying business need, for both of these models. For example, the business need to create, approve, authorize and deliver just-in-time corporate compliance, policy & procedure content necessitate the need for traditional KM style Content Management Systems. Think about the content for Corporate Compensation Policies and HR Polices – while content in this case is incarnated by various corporate specialists, SMEs, the business need demands for clear charter and governance structure for incarnating, approving and authorizing the content. In contrast, when the underlying business driver is to drive innovation with group wisdom, SM is a perfect fit. In fact, in some of my earlier enterprise implementations we successfully used both of these models – Knowledge Management style systems to incarnate, maintain and deliver just-in-time context-sensitive role-based policy, compliance and procedure style content, and Social Media to drive innovation with group collaboration and wisdom.

HR Audit as a Risk Mitigation Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:46:00 +0000

With Dow Jones YTD returns plunging to -25.00% this week, we all witnessed how the debacle of financial institutions is paralyzing the whole economy. Clearly, poor risk management and short-sight of financial institutions are some causes at the roots of this abysmal. As a backbone of organizations human capital strategy, HR has unique opportunity to proactively identify and mitigate these risks with HR Audit. Here are some thoughts.
1. Organization structure and reporting relationships: Inconsistent job functions and reporting relationships are the evidences of poor risk management, oversight and control. A systematic and disciplined review can pin-point the reporting relationships, authorizations, roles and responsibilities that are not conducive to effective risk management. For example, the audit may reveal a missing portfolio level risk assessment function for new investments and induce the need for additional reporting relationships to enforce managerial approvals for transactions involving high risk.
2. Objective and goal management process: Establishing realistic and achievable goals is critical to ensure that the managers are not tempted to signup for the risks that can put the whole organization in danger. The audit is an excellent opportunity to identify and improve situations where the unrealistic goals are contributing to the organization abysmal.
3. Talent alignment to organizational objectives: The goals and pay practices should be established so that everyone is imminently working on things that are most important to the organization as a whole instead of the individual interests that artificially inflate performance numbers. Audit should reveal situations where the goals and pay practices of divisions/departments/interests are not congruent with the true interests of organization to create long term stakeholder wealth.
4. Training: Training should clearly communicate to employees about their roles, responsibilities, expected performance and conduct. The expected performance here needs to be clearly defined in the context of organizational performance and success instead of individual performance. Audit should uncover training gaps in this area to deploy additional training courses to fill these gaps.
5. Hiring practices and Talent Management: Employees that are competent and know what to do in a given situation are critical to drive organizational success. The audit may reveal knowledge and experience gaps, for example missing knowledge of risk assessment, for critical job roles. These finds can then feed into required competency definitions for job functions and related hiring/development processes.

A systematic and disciplined HR audit can uncover serious risk exposures to organizational performance and enable organizational leadership to proactively mitigate these risks at the foundation level with the innovative HR strategies.

Estimated Cost of Bailout: $700 Billion; Return of Investment: TBD

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:20:00 +0000

In Enterprise IT world no IT project gets funded without a formal Return of Investment analysis. Even in very beginning phases of project, often called initiation/qualified idea phase, a very high-level business case including ROI & risk assessment is predicament to fund the resources required for further definition. It is not uncommon for large Enterprise Initiatives to get approval for the overall budget soon after the ROI justification, however funding of budget will be done in a phased approach, only upon the successful conclusion and review of deliverables from earlier phases. In contrast, operational costs are recurring cost of business operations and do not necessarily require extensive ROI analysis for funding.
On corollary, most fiscal government policies are enacted into law and generally do not require additional approvals. Chairman Bernanke sometime back clarified that the proposed bailout plan is not a fiscal plan instead it’s a market-focused initiative that buys (and sells) assets using market-focused pricing strategies such as options. While everyone agrees that something need to be done to help the economy, market-focused initiative of this size demand clear quantification of associated costs, risks and value. However, these are the missing pieces in this puzzle currently.

Blogger H.J. Huneycutt wrote “It's a mystery to me as to why the concept of ROI is constantly evoked in the business world, yet almost never used when evaluating government policies. If the government can complete a task more efficiently than the private sector, then by all means it should do so. If it cannot, it should keep away.”

While no detailed ROI assessment in testimony, below are some interesting estimates from bloggers on cost of doing/not doing this.

Calculated Risk: “Price is still the key. Since Treasury doesn't plan on churning the $700 billion, the losses will be a portion of the amount invested - and the losses depend on how much Treasury pays (or overpays!) for the assets. The losses are unknowable at this point, but probably in the zero to $300 billion range”

Brett Arneds in his WSJ Blog: “The Federal government pays just 4.34% interest on long-term, 30-year loans. So the government could borrow this money for 30 years at a cost of just $30 billion in interest per year. Let's take a worst case scenario. Let's imagine Uncle Sam borrows $700 billion to buy these assets and never gets a single penny of it back. Let's imagine this paper ends up completely worthless. So instead he has to tap taxpayers to pay off part of the principal every year for 30 years, until the loan is all redeemed. How much would that cost per year? Try $42 billion. That's the interest and principal repayment.
That's less than one-third of 1% of our annual gross domestic product. That's the true, annual cost of this bailout.”

On cost of doing nothing (Benefits):

Washington Post: "If nothing is done, the potential for these markets to seize up in a big way is definitely there," said Frederic S. Mishkin, an economist at Columbia University who was a Federal Reserve governor until last month. "When you look at the history of these crises, when things spin out of control, the cost to fix it later goes up exponentially."

CNN Money: "Economists say that without a restoration of credit, unemployment would likely shoot up to over 10% from 6.1% today. And GDP could fall at an annual rate of between 2% and 4%"

The recent debacle of AIG, Lehman and other financial institutions providing profound evidence for the urgent need for detailed planning & risk management, it is imperative to have a detailed plan of action in place before expending valuable tax payer money.

Harnessing the Power of Trust with Pay for Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Darren Gorton in his blog (Item 5 in September Carnival of Trust Top 10) Trust vs Control: Is control merely a substitute for trust? makes a perfect case to nurture the culture of trust to deter fraud and reduce cost of control.

I further extend his point and argue that creating, developing and nurturing Pay for Performance culture is the first step towards harnessing the power of trust between employees, business partners and stakeholders. Here is why.
1. Organizations that embrace Pay for Performance philosophies communicate often with their employees about organization goals, contribution of individuals to the organization goals and how individual pay is linked to the performance. This transparency is the first seed in developing trust between employer and employees
2. A well-designed pay-for-performance system increases employees’ understanding of what is required of them, their performance and the organization’s outcomes. Merit awards, bonus and promotions are based on evaluations by the person's supervisor, colleagues and people they supervise. So everyone knows that the rewards are based on collective feedback of the team itself, fostering team trust and collaboration.
3. With Pay for Performance culture, the pay increases and bonus are consistent across the various functional units of the company. So, everyone in organization puts their best to drive organizational goals, fostering cross-functional synergies.
4. Organizations that use sound pay-for-performance practices enable transparency of executive pay and it’s linkages to performance to the stakeholders. Empowered with this transparency, stakeholders and business partners now have more reasons to trust the organization leadership pursuit of corporate goals.

With the difficult economy driving the urgent need to bring out the best in people (with trust) and reduce the cost (of controls and fraud), there is no better time than now for organizations to create, develop and nurture the culture of trust and transparency with Pay for Performance practices.

How Global is your Talent Management Platform?

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:34:00 +0000

As more and more Talent Management vendors claim globally capable, it is increasingly becoming difficult for organizations to assess the level of globalization & localization enabled by these vendor platforms. Depending on architectural maturity, different Talent Management vendor platforms may have varying degrees of support for multi-language, multi-currencies, local compliance and data security. What really matters is the ability of Talent Management platform to support a combination of all of these to enable business agility and visibility.

For example, consider a global Compensation scenario where a centralized compensation department in headquarters administers the overall job families, levels and codes. However, the salary structures and grades are defined at country level to ensure alignment with the local market trends. However, a line manager managing a global team should have cohesive visibility to overall team performance along with the country specific guidelines for pay awards. On the same token the county level data protection policies mean the HR Administrators in one country should not have access to personal data of employee in other countries. In addition, the country level aggregated metrics may be visible to the authorized senior executives for benchmark purposes.

Figure: Planning Tool for Global Line Managers; Courtesy: Workstream (see disclaimer in side layout)

To support this complex use case the Talent Management platform should
1. Enable line managers with a cohesive Pay for Performance tool to manage global teams. The platform should have capabilities to define and administer team hierarchies.
2. Support capabilities to define salary grades and compensation guidelines by country/division
3. Support for country level segmentation for HR data administration
4. Role based dashboards and analytics enforcing data segmentation and hierarchical business rules
5. Business rules for sharing summary/aggregated information and insight
6. Support for local compliance reporting

It is imperative for organizations to thoroughly evaluate the true global capabilities of vendor platforms prior to selection, to avoid surprises later in implementation.

Power of Metrics in Preparing a Compelling Business Case for Talent Management

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:09:00 +0000

As Meg Bear indicated in her blog, a compelling business case is critical to get the buy-in for launching Talent Management 2.0 initiatives. While the faltering economy created awareness of efficient Talent Management strategies to attract, engage, develop and motivate talent, the challenge often is how to quantify the business value from TM investments for a winning business case? One approach is to begin with end in mind – once you deploy the solution what specific tools it will enable to achieve business goals?

Figure: Most Commonly Used Talent Management Metrics Courtesy: TM talent management magazine July'08

To start with, above are some high-level categories of commonly used Talent Management metrics. Decompose these categories into actionable metrics that will enable HR organization to contribute to business goals. You can apply the insight from Cathy - for example, in Cost to hire category think about measures that will help you to measure the effectiveness of new hires. What percentage of new hires got “above/exceeded expectation” rating in first six months review? What percentage is below average? How these barometers enable you to decide sourcing plan of action? What would be the estimated financial impact of these proactive strategies?
By clearly articulating the actionable insight that the Talent Management solution enables and how business strategy is hinge upon this insight, you are on your way to get the executive buy-in for the winning business case.

Talent Management 2.0 as a Hedging Strategy to Recession

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:07:00 +0000

Despite of global economy slowdown worries, two Talent Management vendors with dominant presence in online Recruiting space reported record revenues this week. StepStone, covering 13 European countries, reported quarterly revenue of EUR 30.9m (approximately $48m) driving year-over-year growth of 30%. Corollary to this, Taleo, with 13% revenues outside North America, reported quarterly revenue of $38.8 million, driving year over year growth of 25%.

Chart: DOW & TLEO Courtesy: Yahoo Finance

This growth pattern is essentially a manifestation of prevailing need for efficient Talent Management practices in difficult economic times. The plummeted budgets and reduced headcounts are driving the perennial need to find few talented people that can do more with high quality and at reduced cost. More than ever, now it is imperative for organizations to leverage technology to reduce recruiting/sourcing dollars, enable operating synergies, and reduce time and cost to hire. Hence the continued market demand for these leaders in E-Recruitment space.

Update on Google Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:18:00 +0000

With the continuous incoming global traffic, my blog on Healthcare Enterprise 2.0 climbed to number 1 position in Google ranking this week, and the blog on Business Intelligence Mashups climbed to rank 2 in related searches.

Thanks to the global reader community for the continued support

HR Insight

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:36:00 +0000

This week Gautam Ghosh spurred the discussion on HR Metrics with “What would be metrics that a HR Generalist would need to keep in mind, apart from retention and attrition metrics?”. Especially, I liked the way he captured the essence of HR Analytics with the following three bullet points.

“1. Orientation Metrics - How soon can people start being productive after they join. These would be subjective measures usually, but can be objective for certain jobs - How many days/months it takes for the new accountant to process invoices to a standard etc.

2. Development Metrics - These would depend on the nature of the industry - but a generalist could be evaluated on how many employees get promoted or are on the fast track development program as part of the talent management process.

3. Bench metrics- This is related to point 2 above but needs to be seen as a business metric more. How many people are there who are ready to take over the key roles in the business if the current incumbent does not come to office tomorrow?”

In addition to the above that Gautam identified, I would add the following metrics that provide visibility to the effectiveness of Talent Acquisition, Workplace Safety, Employee Satisfaction and Pay for Performance practices.

1. Talent Acquisition metrics: Metrics to measure the effectiveness of Talent Acquisition practices - What is the average aging of open requisitions? What positions take longest to fill?
2. Workplace Safety metrics: How many injuries are reported? Where are the risk areas?

3. Employee Satisfaction Survey metrics: How satisfied employees are with the workplace? % of favorable responses to survey - do you recommend working here to your close friend/relative?

4. Pay for Performance effectiveness metrics: How people are paid conducive to their performance?

Figure: Web 2.0 fortified HR Insight Courtesy: Workstream

Any other key HR metrics that you think of? Please add to the list with your comment.

Innovation 2.0 to Beat Economic Slump

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:29:00 +0000

Slowing economy means meager R&D resources and budgets. The success of organizations in these difficult economic times really hinge upon innovating market-focused products with reduced cost and time to market. More than ever, now it is imperative for organizations to relentlessly harness the power of large pool of consumer, employee and partner wisdom using Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Innovation Marketplace/Ideas Community is an excellent opportunity for organizations to rapidly discover ideas and tap into group wisdom from employees, customers and partners. Essentially, these Enterprise 2.0 style tools empower participants to contribute to innovation by posting, commenting and rating the ideas that are then evaluated by innovation committee for implementation. Furthermore, social mining and intelligence technologies enable organizations to identify, target, motivate and reward most influential participants.

Courtesy: SalesForce.com

Some organizations that are already reaping the benefits of Innovation/Idea Communities:

1. Cisco (BrightIdea Innovation Management SaaS)

Courtesy: Cisco

2. Dell (SalesFoce.com SaaS) : In Dell words “The goal is for you, the customer, to tell Dell what new products or services you’d like to see Dell develop. We hope this site fosters a candid and robust conversation about your ideas".

Courtesy: DellIdeaStorm

Experian, Honeywell, British Telecom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Emerson and Harley-Davidson Motor Company are in the long list of other companies that are embracing this Innovation Management phenomena.

Enterprise 2.0 – A $4.6 B Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:07:00 +0000

A new study by Forrester forecasts that Enterprise 2.0 solutions to capture an astonishing market share of 4.6 billion by 2013 and Social Networks related technologies are expected to take the lion share of these investments, accounting for approximately $2 billion. These findings, as outlined by Sarah Perez and Larry Dignan, are consistent with my earlier blog on this subject.

Courtesy: Sarah Perez

Moreover, the study confirms the observations and experiences of Enterprise 2.0 professionals that the business leaders are enamored of business value from Web 2.0 technologies. However, the unbridled enthusiasm of business leaders often gradually tempered by the limited resources and budgets of IT support teams. In addition, the evolving stage of these invasive technologies in enterprise world mean new challenges for meager IT teams to find skilled resources that can make these technologies work for enterprise, balancing collaboration, security and controls. These internal challenges should naturally lead enterprises to implementation and thought partners that can help them in harnessing the power of Enterprise 2.0.

With these trends, I foresee vendors that package social capabilities into their existing collaboration offerings to have a clear advantage, especially in the large enterprise segment. For example, IBM Lotus suite with integrated Lotus Connections (social) and Mashup server mean less installation, implementation, integration and learning curve challenges for IT teams and organizations that prefer on-premise installations. Nonetheless, this packaging should also help IT teams to simplify and optimize the infrastructure and support structures.

Courtesy: IBM

In addition, for enterprises that are challenged by the limited budgets and internal skills, SaaS incarnations should be a natural evaluation. Especially in internal Social Networks area, I foresee excellent opportunities for Talent Management SaaS vendors to lead with best practices models (employee profile), integrations (Employee directory, trend analysis and learning’s) and security (SSO). With major Talent Management players already embracing some of these concepts, the forecasted trend spend should further proliferate vendor investments in this area.

Recession Proof Enterprise 2.0?

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:58:00 +0000

Recent Fed projections indicate slower growth and higher unemployment ahead. Unemployment is expected to peak to 5.3%, highest since March 2005. Does this mean obscure times ahead for IT professionals enamored of enterprise value from Web 2.0 innovations? Not necessarily. Data indicates that while some job sectors continue to feel the heat from the slowdown, IT sector is expected to sustain continued growth. According to a Gartner survey, more than half of participant companies plan to increase their IT budget in 2008. Furthermore, James Cooper in his Business Week column points that the Services sector continues to add new jobs while the overall employment rate continue to recede.

Source: Business Week

OK, why spend money on IT in a slow economy? The current unprecedented economic and business challenges mandate Enterprise 2.0 trajectory to reduce cost, motivate employees and create customer delight. Based on a McKinsey survey, Web Services (SOA) and Collaboration related Web 2.0 technologies top the list of executives in leading the business transformation efforts.

Source: McKinsey Quarterly

These business drivers mean exhilarating upcoming opportunities for IT professional with these Web 2.0 skills. So, get ready to enjoy the ride.

Talent Management Vendors Get Social

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:34:00 +0000

Quite a lot is already said on the power of social networks to promote employee collaboration in a enterprise. As employee life cycle in a enterprise starts with on-boarding, the employee social network process has a natural fit in HRIS/Talent Management context. On corollary most of these vendor offerings are built around employee profile application. It would be quite interesting to see what some of big Talent Management players are doing in this area.

1. SAP
Motivated by the internal success of social networks from Harmony, SAP is expected to soon rollout these capabilities into it's portal and HCM/Talent Management customer offerings, per Dan Farber.

SAP internalizes social networking for business “SAP doesn't yet offer Web 2.0-style social networking capabilities in its solutions that tap into the wisdom of employees, partners and customers, but it has an internal service, called Harmony. Dennis Moore, general manager of emerging systems, called it a "MySpace for the enterprise," speaking at SAP Sapphire in Atlanta. It starts with SAP employee profiles in the HR system, which serve as a foundation for connecting employees professional and personal interests. It started out as a a network for the top talent group of employees. Now it is expanded to all employees. We are getting better as drinking our own champagne"

Courtesy: Craig & Nicole

2. Oracle
After getting the gist of internal social networks with AppsLab, I believe Oracle has enough reasons to integrate this value into their next generation of Fusion HCM offerings.

Oracle Gets Social “So we set out on this path to understand social networking behind the firewall. Last Friday we launched our first social application. It was a basic directory application with employee names, titles, emails and phone numbers. That’s about it. Rich built it in just a few weeks. The only differentiating feature from our current corporate directory, was that we allowed employees to request other employees to “join their network”. To “launch” our Alpha, I sent an email to a group of a few hundred people inside Oracle. In the first hour of operation we went from 3 users (Jake, Rich, and I) to over 270 users. After 10hrs we were nearing 2,000 users and today we hit 10,000, just over 1/7th of the entire organization”

Courtesy: Justin Kestelyn

3. SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors Unveils Employee Profile
“ By combining the interactivity, ease of use and connectedness of a social network with highly valuable, contextual performance data, Employee Profile delivers an addictive, highly valuable solution that takes the concept of an employee directory to a far more meaningful and strategic level. For managers and executives, Employee Profile provides a powerful new way to understand and gain insight into the talents, interests and potential of employees throughout an organization. Armed with greater visibility into a company's talent pool, managers are able to make smarter decisions in how they recruit, form teams to solve business problems and tackle new challenges.”

4. Taleo
Performance 2.0: Empowering the Next Level of Business Results claims the use of social networks for mentoring, coaching and learning.

With the internal social success of Oracle and SAP providing enough motivation for customers to go social, we can expect to see other niche Talent Management players to get on to the social wagon soon.

Mashup Business and IT teams to bridge Business Intelligence gaps

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:45:00 +0000

If you are thinking why your business teams are losing confidence in your Business Intelligence technology team, take a look at sizable backlog of analytics requests in your IT queue and you are sure to find the answer! In addition, given today’s recessions concerns it is increasingly becoming important for organizations to understand the spend trends and bend the cost trend by increasing efficiencies and reducing cost. These emerging business requirements continue to intensify business hunger for more data to only exacerbate your IT backlog issue. Can your team ever catch up with the ever-growing data needs of your business users? Relax, Enterprise Mashups are on the way for your rescue.

IBM Mashup Server: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/screenshots/0SN/imsk04.html?opendocument&techid=0SN

Clearly, the real beauty of Enterprise 2.0 solutions like Mashups is in their ability to maximize overall business value by empowering each team member, including your business and IT specialists, to co-create and add incremental value towards the end solution. Especially, with IBM’s Secure Mashup Technology (Smash) announcement last month and continued investments in Mashup Hub technologies form big players, IBM and Oracle, I see a excellent opportunity for IT managers to create rapid business value in Business Intelligence area. In a nut-shell, Mashup hub technologies enable business users to create a new meaning by assembling information from two or more data feeds, created and exposed by your IT team, using drag and drop style tools. Embedded capabilities to define data feeds from popular ERP systems and legacy data sources should further enable IT teams to rapidly expose security encapsulated data feeds to the business users. So, Mashup technologies can effectively address IT backlog, capacity and requirements gaps issues in Enterprise Business Intelligence context by making your business users part of the solution instead of problem.

For example, in a enterprise context financial analysis is one area that drives the need to assemble the data from the disparate enterprise systems. To understand the cost drivers, business analysts often need to drilldown from summary cost reported in Journal to the actual transaction level data such as items, invoices, purchase orders, expenses and employee pay checks that actually originated the summary Journal entry in General Ledger system. In large organizations it’s not uncommon to have more than 50 enterprise systems feeding Journal entries into the GL system. While this cost analysis can be accommodated by building a complex data warehouse with normalized detail data from these 50+ enterprise systems and sophisticated analytical capabilities, this often require considerable amount of time and resources. In contrast, IT leads can solve the immediate needs of business users by quickly creating and exposing granular data feeds from GL and other subsystems using Mashup hub technologies. Business users can then assemble Journal summary data feed with the required subsystem feeds using the drag and drop style tools to create new meaning in a context and format that is relevant to them. Nonetheless this rapid assembly framework also relieves IT resources from the complex task of creating a model that can accommodate all the permutations of data joins that business users are requesting.

Moreover, building strategic business intelligence solution for solving complex business problems is often a multi-year large initiative that require significant amount of time and resources. In addition, the requirements in business intelligence area tend to evolve over the time as the business and IT teams continue to experiment with the data. Mashups can effectively address these challenges by providing a rapid assembly framework to address the urgent analytical needs of business users today and at the same time empowering IT and business managers with a powerful feedback mechanism to craft the long term BI strategy. On corollary, the group usage and Mashup patterns provide valuable insight into the real data and analytical needs of business users to further drive the direction, scope and road map for the strategic BI solution. So, this may the perfect time to drive operational efficiencies, co-creation and collaboration across your business and IT teams using Mashup technologies, a well tested concept in social networks.

Talent Management SaaS to Survive and Sparkle in Slump?

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:33:00 +0000

As I browse through analyst predications for 2008, here is what I think businesses can expect this year and beyond.
· As we witnessed huge volatility in stock market this week, more and more analysts predict continued economic slump. Thoughtful business leaders are preparing for this slump with creative operational strategies to increase operational margins by reducing cost, contingency plans and investments in R&D.
· Globally it is increasingly becoming difficult to find and retain skilled labor. To drive the bottom line, organizations need to attract, retain and motivate skilled labor globally with the innovative talent management and pay for performance strategies.
· To keep costs low and drive operational efficienies managers need to make data driven decisions. This is only possible if the data is captured and right tools are available to translate the data into information and insight needed for effective decision making.
· In addition, the hunt for global talent continue to drive the need for technology infrastructure that promotes collaboration and innovation, and at the same time reduce risk.

Here is how a integrated Talent Management SaaS can help to survive and sparkle in a slump.
1. SaaS solution can translate hefty infrastructure and software license & maintenance cost into a low monthly service fee, relieving your balance sheet for the other R&D investments that are most critical in slump times. Rapid deployment approaches that SaaS vendors mastered helps businesses to implement SaaS solutions in much less time and cost compared to the expensive upgrades to internal ERP systems.
2. Integrated Talent Management with Pay for Performance framework enables managers to attract, retain and motivate talent with internally consistent and externally competitive compensation strategies and high-performance cultures, and Internationalization and Globalization technologies to engage, attract and motivate global talent
3. Integrated controls and security to ensure regulatory compliance
4. Integrated analytics and dashboards to enable data driven decision making and drive incremental improvements
5. Integrated Talent Management with Web 2.0 style productivity tools and collaboration technologies - org chart, address books, Ajax style user interfaces, Workflows & Wikis, enable businesses to further drive the bottom line with the global talent and to sparkle in this economic slump.

Enterprise 2.0 Therapy for Healthcare Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Gopi Padakandla) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:52:00 +0000

As key economic indicators continue to indicate recession, more and more companies are taking wait and see approach to their strategic IT investments. However, Healthcare is one of the few industries that continue to invest heavily in strategic IT projects. If you are a information technologist with a passion to build business driven technologies, then take a closer look at Healthcare. You are sure to be thrilled with the exciting technology opportunities driven by the business problems in this industry. Especially what makes a technologist job more interesting in this industry is a classic Enterprise 2.0 dilemma – to drive innovation and cost reduction using collaborative open technologies or build silo worlds with rigid controls. There is no easy answer to this dilemma and Healthcare organizations are aware of this. They know that the only solution to this problem is to work inside out with a systematic upgrade of IT systems to the next generation applications and technologies so that they can find a perfect mix of open collaboration and disciplined control that will enable them to promote innovation by successfully managing the risks. So are the exhilarating Enterprise 2.0 opportunities in this segment.

To further explore Healthcare balancing act of collaboration and control with Enterprise 2.0 style technologies, let us take a look at some business drivers in Human Capital Management space. In a Healthcare organization with geographically dispersed services facilities, it is critical for employee communities (nurse and physician communities for example) to share best practices and lessons learned in order to drive quality and productivity improvements. This business problem drives the need for collaborative websites and related technologies for knowledge sharing. If you are a technologist that knows the minimal cost and proven scalability value of social collaboration software for the enterprises then this is the perfect opportunity for Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, large workforce including union contracts in healthcare organization drives the need to prevent financial liabilities from lawsuits by securing the organization from internet-based threats such as inappropriate content. Together, these drivers bring a unique healthcare Enterprise 2.0 opportunity to create a technology-mix that is cost effective, promote sharing and reduce risk.

On the other side of Healthcare opportunity spectrum are HIPAA and SOX regulations that drive the need for tight controls to prevent and detect unauthorized access to systems and data. Related technology opportunities include automating IdM user provisioning/de-provisioning process with employee on-boarding, promotion, transfer and termination events in HRMS. For example, while employee termination deactivates employee’s user profile in IdM so that the employee can no longer access any enterprise system, employee promotion to a manager position may add an additional role in IdM to indicate additional authorities in enterprise-wide systems. Nonetheless all the enterprise applications need to be configured to honor the privileges (authentication and authorization rules) setup in Identity Management.

As the security nuts and bolts are tightened with the enterprise-wide authentication and authorization framework using IdM, it is the perfect time to further enhance workforce productivity by delivering personalized tools and applications to the employee desktops using Enterprise Portals and Single Signon technologies. In Enterprise Portal context there are opportunities again to combine Web 2.0 innovations such as Blogs and Wikis to promote collaboration and enterprise innovation. Furthermore, connecting internal communities to external vendor, supplier and consumer communities using a mix of collaboration and security technologies is another interesting Enterprise 2.0 opportunity in a Healthcare environment.