For Business Intelligence which type of solution is best will ultimately depend on individual business circumstances. The solution type assessment that has been discussed in this series of articles will aid that decision.

We are in the age of careful spending. So companies need to know that each dollar spent is going to provide business value. It is important to develop a consolidated global view irrespective of operational software used. Consolidating data into a common platform is not always easy. The Data Warehouse must always be the single source of the truth for corporate information. This must be based on an open and flexible architecture that is extendible. To be clear, whether the data warehouse database is a bespoke design or implements a packaged solution there is still a large amount of work to be completed. There will always be the need to build a project team and acquire data for the data warehouse.

When ready made solutions provide best results

Generally ready-made solutions provide best results when they offer a high degree of integration for existing operational applications. If using a corporate-wide ERP or CRM solution that provides the backbone tying all corporate applications together then it is possible to utilise the associated data warehouse as the corporate Business Intelligence backbone. The preference for a pre-built database can be strengthened if all of the applications identified can be provided by the same vendor.

Ready-made solutions are becoming increasingly complex as the solution providers learn and adapt their data models based on real business scenarios, these will continue to evolve into the future.

What custom solutions can provide

Custom-made data warehouses are capable of supporting any application that is required to run against it. The primary concern will always be the amount of time necessary to develop any solution. Even where packaged Analytic applications are to be used is it generally necessary to tweak the metadata to enable them to function smoothly against the database. Often these Analytic applications can best be supported through a custom data mart, fed by the data warehouse – the single source of truth.

When custom solutions provide best results

Custom solutions provide the best results when there is a high degree of complexity in the corporate legacy architecture, even if there is an intention trim and simplify the architecture. Custom solutions are also best when the solution itself is likely to be unique in nature, e.g. when your corporation is genuinely the only corporation in the world doing this – however this situation is increasingly rare in today’s business climate.

Five years ago the combination of complex business processes and a complex architecture guaranteed that customised solutions were necessary. Today this is less clear cut. look at some industry models and see whether it is possible to adapt them before making the final decision.

Leveraging the Solution Type Assessment

In the earlier articles the author talked about a Solution Type Assessment. Through this process it is possible to build a score based on firstly mission criticality, and secondly the complexity rating for your organisation. These will act as a weighting factor for the importance of each item covered in the decision process.the weighting factor should be agreed before starting the assessment. In weighting there is a tendency for business to show a low weighting factor for IT issues, this MUST be avoided as the technical obstacles do need to be considered.

The Complexity to Provide column relates to the ability of the current data processing facilities to provide such data in a succinct and meaningful way. It becomes complex if data is stored in many different systems across the world, and in different languages. It is also complex if many types of data storage system are used (e.g. non-relational data stores and relational data bases can provide parts of the data).

Overall taking a solution type assessment will ensure the necessary due diligence considerations are covered. Of course capability has to assessed alongside the overall project costs. Customised solutions can be implemented over a longer period of time whereas ready-made solutions will generally be implemented altogether, even if some data comes on-line at a later date.

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This series will be taking a break for a few weeks, but when it returns the next article will focus on: “Staffing your BI Solution”

Previous:

Part 1: Financing the Business Intelligence Project (Buy or Build?)

Part 2: BI Project Decisions: Ready Made Database Options

Part 3: The Corporate Architecture and Complexity of Data Links

Part 4: Financing the BI Project: Uniqueness Factors (or USP)

Part 5: Starting your BI Project: Suitable Analytical Applications

1. Whether to use a ready-made solution or have it custom built
2. What degree of external staffing resources are required

This is the first part in a series about financing your BI deployment.

In addition project costs will be impacted by:

◊ The focus of the solution; operational or strategic

◊ The type of architecture selected

◊ The development methodology

These are all issues that the decision maker needs to be aware of whilst working with the business to initiate the project. Financial justification is of-course vital to this process. It is essential that agreement is reached by the project board based upon the holistic needs of the business. How the business interacts with the project and the resulting solution will in the end determine the success of the implementation. This is a corporate-wide decision to make.

Some of the decision may differ in scale when extending an existing Business Intelligence solution, but on the whole the various aspects of this article all have to be considered.

Ready-Made or Custom Built?

This is a decision that impacts the structure of the underlying database, the Data Warehouse. In the past it was a relatively clear-cut decision that few if any solutions provided alongside new operational applications could offer anywhere near the complexity necessary to support strategic decision making. Their only contribution was in respect of operational decision making. The strategic decision making required more data to be aggregated from multiple systems in order to provide the right results.

Each packaged solution requires some customised data and user interfaces to ensure it fits each end-user business. The business is also expected to change its processes in order to work with certain applications. The use of ready-made OLTP solutions has made the task of hiring business community staff and training them easier. E.g. Job advertisements for an Accounts Administrator can specify SAP experience.

So can this experience be applied to the implementation of the Business Intelligence solution? Much depend on the factors making each business unique and the range of applications that will continue to be used within the organisation. Few, if any, of the true BI focused applications feature highly in any business community staff resumes, so training is always essential.

From the systems side a changing IT landscape during the past twenty-odd years where we prefer to buy rather than build encompasses the possible use of packaged solutions for both the Data Warehouse and the BI tool-kit. In order to make such a decision it is necessary to consider the impact of:

◊ The corporate architecture including the complexity of data links

◊ The degree of integration of existing systems

◊ Factors of uniqueness for the business

◊ The suitability of analytical applications

All of which can assist in assessing the suitability of potential ready-made solutions. In all cases it is important to understand the general goals of the business’s market sector, for example in some statutory controls will have a large impact and in others none. It is always necessary to consider what your corporation’s principle competitors are measuring, if only to ensure that you exceed those minimums. It would be great to have a sneak peek at the competitor’s solution, but often industry journals give an expose on what they are doing – these can be analysed to identify the factors being measured.

Another impact is the factors of uniqueness, e.g. what your corporation brings to the marketplace – each company has them, make sure you identify them.

The third factor that need to be considered is the existing legacy IT architecture. Many corporations have already purchased some of the technology that is intended to be used for the solution. Many systems come with data integration elements. From a pure cost effectiveness standpoint you should look at re-use instead of purchasing a new ETL solution. Most companies have them – it is a matter of whether they are fit for the new intended use. Another area to consider is pre-existing and spare licenses for existing analytical tools – many corporations complain about the cost of licensing, yet do not effectively utilise the licenses they already have.

The next article in this series: “Types of Ready Made BI Solutions”

This is part of a series on communications and links to other articles on this site…

There are several types of communication that are important to the average business today:

◊ Direct one-to-one, a dialogue

◊ One-to-many, broadcasting

◊ Many-to-many, such as in a meeting

On a “One to One” basis we communicate directly or through another medium. There are differences in how we communicate but there is generally a dialogue that occurs in any conversation. Our approach may be different say for a letter (if anyone writes these anymore) or an email than in a conversation, but it is a dialogue nonetheless. In a conversation we will deal with one point at a time, whereas in a letter we tend to put in all of the related detail before sending it.

Email differs from a normal letter in that it is not purely a one-to-one messaging tool, it allows us to send that same message to multiple people. We developed the ability to broadcast early in human history as well – remember the smoke-signals used by Native Americans were almost certainly used in other ancient societies; even 16 century England had a fire warning system used to send messages rapidly across the country in order to prepare for an expected attack of the Spanish Armada, allowing them to muster forces at a time when sending a message by traditional means was agonisingly slow.

“One to Many” messages are used in a multitude of ways, like a newspaper article, telegraph, radio, television. The ‘presenter’ prepares their statement and makes it via the appropriate medium. In the modern world we are putting a lot of this information on-line in the form of blogs or websites, but the majority still follows the process of one person posting for all to see.

“Many to Many” communications don’t really exist through any of the traditional communications media. A meeting may give everyone an opportunity for everyone to speak, but it is in reality held through a series on one to many communications. Us humans are simply not able to handle multiple simultaneous conversations; so we have developed a protocol that enables us to achieve the effect of a many-to-many conversation.

Computers on the other hand are able do multiple things at the same time more effectively and they can communicate with other computer at a speed allows messages to travel the globe in an instant.

The changing world of business communications is largely about empowering collaboration between people who are interested in a particular outcome. In business relationships matter and have always been vital for success, in fact it plays on another basic part of human nature. The need for a crew to work together for the success of the voyage is as vital in a trawler facing a ferocious storm as it is in your business.

Each person involved brings with them something unique that helps the team succeed. Yet today we are able  to contribute in so many ways and continue contributing. With the use of Social Media it is even possible to have our customers make a contribution to our product development which can be a vital part of our success. Collaboration is a very personal thing. Each and every person has a sphere of collaboration, which is about them, their team, the department they work for, the company, customers, suppliers, third-parties, industry experts, etc. Even their friends perhaps have a role to play.

Ultimately the changing world of business communications is about improving out ability to collaborate. It is about bringing the right people together, cost effectively, to solve a specific problem, then moving on.

Maximizing resources and aggressively planing for the future are likely to continue to be the expenditure themes for the coming months. Improvements to business effectiveness are more important than ever before, yet projects still need to be delivered. Today on-time and in-budget is increasingly important, yet it is still possible to deliver radical change to the business condition. Technology must not be seen as a “necessary evil” in the eyes of the business owner, it is a key enabler that adds value, yet the modern company does not have to invest in mega systems to get results.

With every project is important to identify a return on investment, and seeking some positive return during the first full year of operation is increasingly important. During the tough times it was necessary to stretch projects out, with a commitment to deliver fewer major projects. You business has to be ready for the economic upturn. Investment in marketing, communications and Social Media are a must have over the coming months, bust the spending must be cost effective. A clear picture of spending and expected benefits must be available to the executive team.

It is important to be making the right decisions at the right time, delaying growth can have negative consequences. Development projects, when correctly timed can have a dramatic effect on the growth we experience. Remember too many project fail because of our desire to fix the world in one massive step. Business is in a state of continuous improvement. If you could look at the oldest corporation in the world, it is unlikely to be run the same way today as it was when it first started. Business improvement will continue to be needed as long as we have business and where there is a culture of improvement there will be projects to facilitate change.

We should always remember that one of the keys to success is that projects are always limited by time and resources, it has always been true that more progress can be made through a series of small steps. As humans we frequently chase after the impossible. If we succeed then we are heroes but failure can carry with it dire consequences. Every business change project needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces. This way we are better able to understand the scope and goals. It is important to look out for the signs of project failure, yet plan for success.  We should look to solve those problems that can be easily solved first. With each problem we need to:

■ Define it

■ Identify any barriers to success

■ Know how serious the problem is

■ Identify options that can assist us

■ Look at the outline costs involved

Fundamentally businesses should look to change its processes before it looks to change its systems. IT system processes are always more complex and more costly to fix than the associated business process. It is not about being opposed to a major systems change, but it is essential to go through the right level of thinking before making any decision to replace applications. The problem is largely one of strategic thinking. Strategic problem solving requires the definition of corporate goals and plans against which all projects are tied. Generally speaking these should be long term goals, yet we must always respond to changing priorities and be able to define new goals when necessary. Yet short term changes should not end up dictating long-term policy.

The business executive today needs to tread carefully over the next few months, yet at the same time plan for growth, then be prepared to aggressively execute against a growth plan at the right time.

From the ability to leverage Social Media as a Marketing and Customer Services tool that allows our business to communicate more effectively. The advantage of good business intelligence is in our ability to leverage the in broad based information set that we have about historical and present company performance, adding in future forecasts and an analytical capability to improve the decision making process. It does not stop their however because better decisions plus increasing efficiencies and our unique selling proposition give us a competitive advantage.

These are key business drivers. My personal background has always been intertwined with Business Intelligence, but am today building a new Social Media strategy company and we are directly involved with changing how corporations of various sizes are approaching this new Social Media.

On the cost effectiveness front most corporations have severely limited budgets, having to do more with less money so building new systems is for many simply out of the question. This is one area where most Social Media solutions bring good news, for most there is no massive systems deployment. In fact it is possible to leverage Social Media solutions with a zero systems outlay – that figure looks good on the spend side of any business. Yet there is a cost in leveraging Social Media, but it comes in other ways:

◊ Social Media advertising

◊ Person-Time  with corporate on-line intervention

Push advertising differs little on Social Media other than an improved ability to speak directly with your target audience. If you are selling shoes and your primary market is 16 to 30 year old women then Social Media advertising can focus on that group. Most of the existing sites can very effectively break down their membership and allow you access to your target audience. But you will not get an email address, you get access to their on-line presence.

On-line advertising has always been accompanied by a low click-rate. Social Media improved this because your message can be more focused for different groups, but you do have to remember that the message must fulfil their exact needs right now – “I have been looking for one of those…” otherwise people won’t even look at your advert. People have learned to tune-out on-line adverts at an early stage in their on-line life because most of the messages were not for them. The mentality still exists, but not people do spend a large amount of time in front of their trusted Social Media sites and messages can be present for more than the 30 second tv commercial.

One of the aspects business intelligence brings to this situation is the ability to measure the impact of our social media efforts. Visits to the corporate site can have a different entry point for social media than it does in a Google search. The actions can be measured, where they have been, what they have done, how long they stayed, etc.. Ultimately that intelligence can be fed-back into the knowledge cycle and allow the corporation to further refine its intervention.

Managing your on-line intervention is vital and this is where real gains can be made. Social Media is a two way street it involves both listening and intervening. Listening and understanding what is being said about our business is key. Listening and understanding applies to all types of businesses, but how? Googling your brand or company should show your web-site to the top of the search results, but it is unlikely to show what someone just said about your company or its brands and products on Twitter. Part of listening is being seen to be paying attention.

Being seen to be paying attention is a key aspect. In Social Media a listening corporation is one who responds to what is being said, even if this means taking one on the chin – admitting faults when they exist. We must of-course remember that some people have an axe to grind and few of our efforts will placate them. but at the end of the day it is important to be seen to respond in a reasonable manner. More so than ever before  everything that is said is available to 6 billion people across the planet – some right now they may care little about your product but people tend to have a long memory for problems. In this respect it may be better to admit the fault and update everyone on the progress of the replacement than go into a traditional denial mode.

The point here is that without a social media strategy your corporation will not know how to respond but with one the response can be timely, direct, and proportionate.

I and many other IT leaders do not see that as being where IT is today. I have written before about how the role of the Head of IT (normally either the CIO or CTO) is changing. The role is becoming one of Chief Change Officer, in other words they should be seen as the best agent for change in the corporation. IT has a background in building capabilities, gaining clarity on corporate requirements, and increasing the commitment where change is needed, and most importantly executing change.

Now I will state here for clarity I do not see the primary role of IT as merely maintaining the equipment and operational applications. In fact that those types of roles may in some instances be more cost effectively managed by a facility management firm who engage operational specialists. IT’s role in an organisation is to focus on two areas:

◊ Changing business processes, and

◊ Contributing to improvements in Business Results.

IT’s role historically has been to respond to stimuli from other departments for change then build or implement systems as needed. More recently it has had to respond to corporate goals and implement corporate-wide solutions that are intended to provide an holistic solution. Ultimately both these areas are about supporting business decision making, being a change agent. Change agents by their very nature cannot be integrated with the very areas where change needs to happen. They need to have an independent viewpoint, but they do need to be able to understand the challenges faced.

It is the independence of IT that allows them to ask challenging questions that will then facilitate positive change.

Chris Anderson has recently published a book called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, which you can download a full unabridged audio copy, ironically free, here. which I am currently listening to as a part of my new business development. My challenge is can we really offer free services and make money out of it? I think the concept has some merit but do have to question where money can be made.

I have been running this site for some time and I know that it has raised my profile within my network and community. Yet is has not assisted my bank balance.

One of the concepts that Chris Anderson discusses is that the cost of on-line storage is reducing to the extent that it is almost free. Also the cost of publishing on-line is also so low that the free model makes sense. Yet there is one thing that can be forgotten in this equation, the value of the time of the author. I have worked for a chunk of my life in managing consulting practices and the cost of the advice given in these pages if used as billable consulting hours would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet it is all here on these pages for FREE!

Please note that this is not written in the form of a gripe, it is written in the desire to learn and understand how to make money from ‘FREE’. I am writing this as the baseline understanding (e.g. the knowledge that I have before I personally understand how to leverage the free model to make money). The one aspect of the equation that is frequently forgotten is the effort or labour of the people making the contribution, especially when the only publication route is the Internet. Even with advertising on your site the amount you can earn through pure on-line knowledge contribution is close to zero.

Is free the default mode of exchange for humans? As Chris Anderson points out that within the family ‘free’ has always been the normal mode of exchange. I guess it is one of the reasons many business start-up guides tell you not to market to family members, because of the tendency to give things away for free. Indeed the Capitalist economy dates back less than four hundred years, yet we often view it as having always been here, and ever present into the future. I am not going to enter into a discussion about the merits of the capitalist system – this is not the right forum. I do however recognise that I live in a capitalist world  and unless that changes have to live by those confines.

Making money from FREE, is an important part of that process. The web is clearly a part of our long-term future and with the low cost for creating a new site and hosting especially when viewed in terms of the thousands of people who visit your site every year.

Is one of the side affects of FREE that we as a society are now tending to sell at an undervalue? Take for example the building of web-sites. Take a short trip through the business district of any city and you can see many adverts saying we can build your web-site for $199.99 or even lower. Yet few people question what the end result is from using such a service, which is clearly attacking the credibility of hard-working web-site developers, whose professional services will run into several thousands of dollars. In this example the buyer should be aware of what they are NOT getting when they buy at an undervalue. Your $199 web site will be a nasty piece of work that will simply put your business on the web with a badly designed web-site. Do a Google search for your site and it will NEVER be found, let along rank on the first page in your specialist area. This is where the professional web-developer adds value, in search engine optimisation and providing a smart os business like site, that is simply not possible by paying $199.

Another aspect of this is the micro-payment economy, which never really took off. Most people would not pay 10 cents for an article because of the pain of making the payment. Yet this is the whole concept of adding Google Adwords to your site – and yes I have included these ads on this site in the vain hope that I will eventually get some money from Google. So please feel free to cause Google give me a micro-payment by clicking on one of these ads, even if you do not buy anything. Just make sure you come back here afterwards!

We can operate quite effectively with a number of free offerings. For example membership of existing social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Plaxo, and others can be through the 5% to 10% of members that do pay for services (e.g. ‘pro’ accounts), or the uptake of member advertising programmes, as well as the commercial advertising revenue from the site. Some of these services can provide very powerful facilities at no cost.

Should there be a nominal charge for such services e.g. $10 per year? I favour the provision of basic FREE services with the addition of cost effective enhanced services e.g. $25 or $50 per year, but with a clear and visible uplift in the available service levels. For example LinkedIn’s premium account pricing structure of $250 per year is not value for money for the majority of users and would not be the price model I would adopt if I were CEO of LinkedIn. Or does the mere fact that there is a price for the service add value to the FREE service?

Now do I understand making money from FREE? Clearly at this stage in my life I do not understand enough. and as I said at the beginning this article is the baseline in understanding the FREE model.

This gives us a big challenge in this new economy.

In November 2008 I reviewed the prospects for hiring in a tight economy and observed that on the job-front “certain sectors of industry are quite buoyant, despite all the bad news on the economic front.” The recruitment process has changed as a result of the economic downturn. Fewer ads are being placed in print (whether newspapers of in trade press), and more emphasis is being placed on finding new employees through personal connections and networking. This is true at every level even with blue collar recruitment.

In December I talked about Strategic Problem Solving and how the success of any organisation rests in the hands of the executives and their ability to solve problems. It is clear that businesses should look to modernise its processes before it looks to change its IT systems. At the end of the day system changes tend to be much more expensive to implement than process changes. When managed correctly process changes themselves can drive cost reduction in the corporation. We lose sight of the fact that a business process can waste resources. These wasted resources can be eliminated when properly examined. One area that should also be examined is Tele-working which can also bring about a reduction in costs, but this needs to be examined in relation to the risks involved.

One of the risks of a recession is that “short term demands can cripple your long term strategy!” The typical response to bad times is that we cut everything to the bone and plan and identify what projects can be dropped or put off till a later time. At the end of the day it is important not to cut R&D budgets and do not cut back on Marketing effort. The wise company spends extra on marketing in bad times. The other area that should not be cut is Business Intelligence which can assist the corporation in plotting the path through the economic changes by focusing finance and marketing efforts.

Earlier this year I talked about the advantage of good Business Intelligence and how to leverage information to create a competitive advantage. In all too many organisations data and information is not used to the best advantage of the corporation, decision tend not to be fact-based. Businesses need to be smarter and to make better decisions. Making better decisions means using the information contained within our Data Warehouse and applying relevant analysis in order to make informed decisions about how to manage the business. With all the data at our finger-tips we stick our thumbs in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

This recession has continued perhaps longer than any of us anticipated. Many businesses would like to say “Hold your horses we are only running a limited number of projects this year” this simply does not meet business reality. So it is important to have a management policy to manage competing priorities. It is not a matter of whether or not to prioritise. It is largely a question of who is the most appropriate person to do a specific task and providing clear priorities within the context of the overall priority list. In the absence of priorities, team members will use their own prioritisation methods. First in first out (FIFO) is rarely the best form of prioritisation, yet it is the method that most people will fall back-on in the absence of any other method, which is why focusing of corporate priorities is so important.

At the end of the day it is still possible to deploy solutions on a shoestring budget. Corporations are nervous about spending money, yet business must go on. Every department is asked to do more with less dollars, yet the source of any cut-backs is not simply by kicking staff out onto the street, although we have seen that happen in record numbers. Statutory compliance will also rank high on the agenda, even if procedures were fully compliant the auditors will be carrying around their magnifying glass for the the immediate future and I expect them to question everything in the annual reports this year.

Every part of our business, including Information Technology, needs to be integrated into the core of the business. We are no longer running a business of separate parts each moving in their own direction, we need to be running a well oiled machine that is focused on the end goal. We have here come back again to ensuring that our business processes are in-tune with those business goals. It is not uncommon for a corporation to define a set of goals then fail to live by them. Everyone needs to know what the goals are.

We need to blend the strategic business focus with making the right decisions across the corporation, combined with processes that are in-tune with business goals.

It has become evident that social medial is no longer simply about chatting with friends and having fun. In fact people are now demonstrating their thoughts and feelings about a wide range of topics from Iran to the colour of their next handbag. Tastes, preferences and values are all being publicly displayed as users build a community and share their thoughts. If views are publicly available then they can be analysed. With all this information this can be a boon for product planning and marketing.

Businesses are also getting involved in Social Media in order to:

• Build trust based networks
• Collaborate with customers, vendors, and others
• Identify opportunities for growth.

Social Media can be viewed by many as the current must-have, but at what cost to the corporation? Are CIOs setting aside the ROI in order to jump start their enterprise social media presence?

On the surface social media tools promise to connect the unconnected, but do they? In many corporations less than 100% of all workers have access to a PC, and many roles possibly will never include any factory worker access to computers, yet those workers still make a valuable contribution to the corporation. Because of the implementation of Instant Messaging (not strictly web 2.0 but it does show the benefits of on-line collaboration) in one corporation a warehouse supervisor spotted a potential error in a customer’s delivery allocation that saved thousands in extra trucking costs – solved by Instant Messaging whilst the department manager was in a meeting and traditionally unavailable.

Contrary to Elizabeth Bennet’s opinion in Feeling the Fear (CIO Insight June 2009) I believe that information sharing tools like wikis, video casts, and blogs can certainly contribute to a transformation of corporate behaviour. An ability to put information, instructions, training material into a wiki or a blog is of great importance. It takes on-line training one step further because the material was written by someone inside the organisation, and may even be someone the user knows.

To say that an organisation is late for the Web 2.0 party is a bit of a misnomer as there is no fixed time by which all corporations have to be compliant.  For some business and IT Leaders there is a tendency to panic once a need is discovered. That panic is based on the (often perceived rather than real) fact that all my competitors are using it and we are not, yet that can lead to a poorly thought out solution that causes more problems than it solves.

I have heard it said that it is not possible to identify an ROI for collaboration improvements and that we only see the real improvements in the rear-view mirror. Yet when I look back over my career this has always been true for any systems implementation. Defining an ROI for any proposed solution is about producing a best estimate  available at the time the need is perceived. That is as relevant for any Social Media implementation as it is for any other corporate change. Remember here the major impact of social medial is more in the area of business than with the technology that underpins it.

Internally setting up of blogs and wikis has more challenges in respect of obtaining contributions that it does with the technology setup. People are keen to initially get involved, but keeping contributions coming after the initial setup is even more vital. This is where the real work occurs in the building of any corporate knowledgebase. Sharing needs to be encouraged through the organisation. This requires a change in mindset, yet many people are already willing and have skills to do it because of their ability to contribute to discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

I am not going to enter the realm of the impact on the corporate psychology of collaboration, that in outside the scope of this article. The whole area of social media is always questioned as to whether contribution in the area of social computing (e.g. blogs, wikis, social networks) whether internal or external constitute real work. This argument must be a part of the ROI for Social Media.

According to “Why ‘Unified’ Is The Hot New Idea For Data Centers” by George Crump, published in Information Week on March 16th 2009 the benefits and risks associated with the approach are:

Benefits:

• The Unified Infrastructure will eliminate the many distinctions particularly in networking, storage, and computing bringing a more cost effective IT organisation.
• IT should be more responsive to business organisational needs to change the IT infrastructure as it will be managed through a single console.
• Delivers a more agile computing infrastructure at a lower cost to bring in IT cost savings.

Risks:

• The amount of change required is considerable and it is important to manage the risk of dissatisfaction as more IT staff worry about their jobs.
• An ability to deliver on ROI without disrupting existing operations while implementing the new architecture.

Organizations increasingly rely on IT to help enable, and even change, their business strategies, they need their IT infrastructure to be more powerful, agile, and cost effective than ever. This is the key argument in favour of implementation. However to implement any significant infrastructure change I think there will have to be a very strong business case and a positive ROI in a matter of a few months. My fear with such a project is that the costs associated with the new unified architecture can outrun the projected savings if the project is not tightly managed. From the perspective of corporate management a project of this type may be seen and only giving an advantage to IT, something that is currently low on their spending priorities at the current time.

One of the challenges faced has been availability of Real-time infrastructure monitoring tools can help data center management to predict faults, and to respond quickly to any faults that do occur. Over 95% of all IT managers have a keen interest in the performance of their data centres. Whilst there is is a large amount of monitoring many in IT feel that the tools that use are inadequate for the job.

In the average Data Centre the server landscape is becoming more complex particularly with the implementation of multi-core computing and virtualization. There is an ever present  need for higher-bandwidth, lower-latency, increasingly dense, rack-mount and blade servers and increased power and cooling demands within the large data center architectures. Virtualization has enabled higher utilisation ratios, but it also brings more complexity in server management. According to Cisco one of the major argument in favour of the Unified Data Centre Infrastructure is that “even modest improvements to total cost of investment (TCO), energy efficiency, and complexity can have a significant cumulative effect on the data centre”. The unified infrastructure can strengthen any argument for virtualization, but also introduces an infrastructure that can bridge any silos. An ability for the IT operations team to prioritise traffic can be a significant bonus.

Can we see a positive cash flow in a matter of a few months? Many elements of the new architecture can reduce the redundancy within the data centre, e.g. running storage and IP traffic through a single unified network interface. Crump suggests that we can reduce the number of cables from 12 to 2. I am intrigued but am mindful that network traffic concerns are part of the reason why multiple interface paths were setup in many data centres in the first place. Of course our infrastructure is always evolving and many of the technologies have rapidly advanced since the data centres were setup. For example the introduction of a 10 gigabit ethernet interface being a key advance.

One further risk that need to be added to Crump’s list is ratification of standards. My concern here is that the concept is currently only supported by two vendors. Many of the corporations I work with are very concerned about standardisation and are unlikely to adopt new technologies ahead of ratification.

I am then led to think about whether this is the only route to resolve many of our data centre problems. The question of whether there are other viable solutions always crosses my mind, none moreso than in this discussion. Many IT managers have been focusing on delivering extra value through virtualization. In most cases this has added complexity to the data centre landscape. Can advanced configuration controls provide a solution? CiRBA and HP offer solutions in this area. I am not looking here to demonstrate the supertirity of one solution over another I am merely wishing to highlight some alternative options.