One can spend a lot of money on IT. One CEO of an outrageously profitable financial services firm (who shall remain nameless at the risk of losing my head or shares) is known to say, despite the climbing profit, “we spend too much on IT.”

Alas, investing in the future is seen as desirable for some companies. But can we at least control the investment?

“As if bracing for each new technological development isn’t challenging enough, the IT function is further ex­pected to manage and implement these changes in an orderly “best practices” manner to help ensure continu­ity of IT deployment in all appropriate business pro­cesses,” states the Enterprise Management Associates’ white paper Service Management Made Simple For Mid-Sized Organizations. “This approach has ushered in the era of service management, where applications are viewed by end-users as utility-grade services available to authorized users throughout the networked company, rather than as siloed, discrete applications unique to individual users and departments.

The paper, prepared for Raritan, a supplier of solutions for managing IT infrastructure equipment, highlights the key attributes of an effective IT management service strategy:

• Integration – support a breadth of functionality (e.g., security, network management, application performance) from a single management view rather than requiring multiple monitoring tools and interfaces.
• Management of changing environments and conditions – Service management processes detect changes in configurations, new devices, applications and networks, sudden shifts in traffic flow or routing, denial of service attacks and other random or unexpected threats that can create havoc within any IT infrastructure.
• Modular deployment – A modular approach provides the best of both worlds – enabling an integrated, holistic management strategy that can conform to best practices, while enabling flexibility and choice in making management investments. Well-designed modular solutions should also be easy to deploy.
• Resilience and reliability – The design objective of service management best practices is to be adaptive to change, and since they are based on defined standards of performance, functionality and management, they are also highly reliable.

Of course, one of the keys is reporting and alerts including alarms and reporting on time to repair and time between failures.

Ultimately what Raritan and others in this space are selling are command center systems (NOCs) that integrate and monitor your infrastructure (“centralize the management of more than 10,000 devices with only one IP address”).

RELATED READING:

“The search engine sucks!” is one of the most common complaints I come across. Naturally, most organizations immediately blame the search engine. They should point the finger at themselves.

Five years ago I wrote the article The search isn't broken, we're broken  (Part I : Search success depends on people and rules). Five years later, not much has changed.

While the search technology itself sometimes is the problem, this is rarely the issue. Search technology has advanced impressively in recent years and yet inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries.

Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information.  “People are lazy,” Cory Doctorow, a   technologist who maintains the popular weblog Boing Boing, told me when I first talked to him 5 years ago. “People are remarkably cavalier about their information and how it is stored. This laziness is bottomless…”

One way of capitalizing on the potential of the search function to insert keywords as meta tags within the actual content pages. But this requires rules and a rulebook, otherwise known as the corporate taxonomy. A taxonomy is a set of rules, or dictionary, for classifying or cataloguing information – whether on the Internet, intranet or shared drives via a LAN or WAN (see Don’t forget to add the tax(onomy).

Meta tags, simply put, are the tags or data that describe the information contained on a page or site. Think of a meta tag as the tag on your shirt collar – it identifies the type of shirt and describes it with information about the materials and the manufacturer. Meta tags can be used to describe the type of data in terms of keywords, description, department, date, author, etc.

However, searching the intranet is fundamentally different than searching the Web:

·         Employee intranet queries are generally far more precise in nature than the average consumer Web search

·         Employees have to find information quickly to do their jobs – not finding the right information is not an option

·         The Internet doesn’t have a taxonomy; the intranet requires one

Autonomy has released an interesting ‘white paper’ (brochure) on 5 Differences Between Business Search and Consumer Search. Most of the paper is designed to get you to buy the Autonomy engine (Ultraseek) and therefore this paper requires a ‘grain of salt.’ Nonetheless, the Autonomy list of 5 differences underlines some important points:

1)     Return Role-based Results - The tasks for which employees use information vary widely, depending on their department and their role within their company.

2)     Provide Multiple Methods of Searching - Standards for search relevance is higher in business. Employees want a single, correct answer to their information request.

3)     Search All Corporate Information Repositories - Corporate information is spread across a host of specialized secure business applications, databases, content management repositories, email systems and Web servers—all of which require special interfaces.

4)     Support Multiple Languages and File Formats - Employees need to access business documents in any language and from a dizzying array of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphic, multimedia, compression and encoding formats.

5)     Enforce Corporate Security Models and Compliance Policies - Access to corporate content must be securely managed in the face of a new matrix of government regulatory mandates and privacy concerns.

The last time I saw Autonomy at work I was impressed; but its expensive and not the answer to every organization’s problems. To underscore my earlier point, search is more than technology. Effective information retrieval and knowledge management principally requires:

• rules and defined processes (taxonomy and meta tagging)
• employees who are not only willing to follow the rules but actively participate in sharing information and knowledge
• effective supporting technology (search, content management, etc.)

Therefore, like most enterprise challenges, there is no silver bullet – and it certainly doesn’t come off the shelf.

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One thing I do like about Autonomy (no I don’t own any shares) and other similar products is their relevance ‘tuning’…. “Ultraseek’s search results can be tuned to match information structure and end-user needs with relevance tuning options that deliver comprehensive control over the relative weighting of metadata fields. In addition, Ultraseek’s exclusive Quick Links feature provides editorial control over search results, allowing keywords to be manually associated with specific URLs that are returned above normal search results.” Cool.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search  

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

The lost meaning of knowledge management

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

I’ve spent much of the week highlighting what I refer to the immaturity and ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the CMS market (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market). Of course, don’t take my word for it. Ask Tony Byrne, the founder and editor of CMSWatch.com, who wrote a very timely and bang-on piece on the industry, Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors

“Most CMS salespeople I know are good educators, but they also have quotas to meet,” writes Byrne. “Under these circumstances, vendors will sometimes short-cut important discussions about functionality and pricing with simple -- but not always completely truthful -- answers.”

Byrne lists his top 10 most common myths you might hear from a CMS salesperson (and they are all too accurate - in green below):

MYTH: "Our interface will sell itself" (This is the sex part)

As I have noted in the past, everyone says they have a WSIWYG editor. Few actually have one.

MYTH: "You only need XY thousand to get started"

It always costs more than they say. Licensing is often a fraction of the cost – implementation is where it adds up.

MYTH: "You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"

Only in some rare organizations does a CMS mean saving headcount.

MYTH: "Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" & "Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"

Open-source has the same implementation story – and it needs support too. Commercial solutions require paid support and they rarely have open communities of support (discussion boards, shared code, etc.).

MYTH: "Access to the source code protects you in an uncertain marketplace"

“Source-code escrow or open-source licensing is nice, but having to muck with source code is faint solace if your vendor expires,” writes Byrne.

MYTH: "No requirements? No problem! Our business analysts can get you started"

Content management requires three major components: technology, people and process. Technology is the often the least problematic. Defining a plan and all requirements requires experience and skill – and time. CMS vendors rarely focus much beyond the technology.

MYTH: "Most enterprises deploy our solution within 4-6 weeks" 

Ha, ha, ha! Sure it is possible… in smaller, extremely well organized companies.

MYTH: "Our migration scripts will take care of your existing content"

Bad content is still bad content on a content management system – regardless of the migration system.

MYTH: "Our product is better than Vignette, for a fraction of the cost"

Yes, Vignette is expensive, but there’s a reason why Vignette is the market leader for enterprise content management. There’s a reason why there are thousands of CMS vendors with very few name client implementations. I’d recommend Vignette for very few organizations, but there are a lot of CMS vendors I’d never recommend to any.

MYTH: "We're the only product with..."

Sure. There are thousands of vendors… what are the chances that someone else has a polling feature too?

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Oh speaking of sex, lies and CMS vendors… since uninviting me to their wine tasting and CMS event (sex), Ziff Davis has sent me the same spam invite four additional times (lies)!!! Since the event organizers never responded to my email or my article (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market), I wrote Ziff Davis’s PR director about their PR mess…. surprise, surprise – no response!!! Outstanding PR (can you hear the tongue boring a hole in my cheek?)

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media