Can IBM become a business leader and a software leader?

When I first started as an industry analyst in the 1980s IBM software was in dire straits. It was the era where IBM was making the transition from the mainframe to a new generation of distributed computing. It didn’t go really well. Even with thousands of smart developers working their hearts out the first three foresees into a new generation of software were an abysmal failure. IBM’s new architectural framework called SAA(Systems Application Architecture) didn’t work; neither did the first application built on top of that called OfficeVision. It’s first development framework called Application Development  Cycle (AD/Cycle) also ended up on the cutting room floor.  Now fast forward 20 years and a lot has changed for IBM and its software strategy.  While it is easy to sit back and laugh at these failures, it was also a signal to the market that things were changing faster than anyone could have expected. In the 1980s, the world looked very different — programming was procedural, architectures were rigid, and there were no standards except in basic networking.

My perspective on business is that embracing failure and learning from them is the only way to really have success for the future. Plenty of companies that I have worked with over my decades in the industry have made incredible mistakes in trying to lead the world. Most of them make those mistakes and keep making them until they crawl into a hole and die quietly.  The companies I admire of the ones that make the mistakes, learn from them and keep pushing. I’d put both IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in that space.

But I promised that this piece would be about IBM. I won’t bore you with more IBM history. Let’s just say that over the next 20 years IBM did not give up on distributed computing. So, where is IBM Software today? Since it isn’t time to write the book yet, I will tease you with the five most important observations that I have on where IBM is in its software journey:

1. Common components. If you look under the covers of the technology that is embedded in everything from Tivoli to Information Management and software development you will see common software components. There is one database engine; there is a single development framework, and a single analytics backbone.  There are common interfaces between elements across a very big software portfolio. So, any management capabilities needed to manage an analytics engine will use Tivoli components, etc.

2. Analytics rules. No matter what you are doing, being able to analyze the information inside a management environment or a packaged application can make the difference between success and failure.  IBM has pushed information management to the top of stack across its software portfolio. Since we are seeing increasing levels of automation in everything from cars to factory floors to healthcare equipment, collecting and analyzing this data is becoming the norm. This is where Information Management and Service Management come together.

3. Solutions don’t have to be packaged software. More than 10 years ago IBM made the decision that it would not be in the packaged software business. Even as SAP and Oracle continued to build their empires, IBM took a different path. IBM (like HP) is building solution frameworks that over time incorporate more and more best practices and software patterns. These frameworks are intended to work in partnership with packaged software. What’s the difference? Treat the packages like ERP as the underlying commodity engine and focus on the business value add.

4. Going cloud. Over the past few years, IBM has been making a major investment in cloud computing and has begun to release some public cloud offerings for software testing and development as a starting point. IBM is investing a lot in security and overall cloud management.  It’s Cloud Burst appliance and packaged offerings are intended to be the opening salvo.   In addition, and probably even more important are the private clouds that IBM is building for its largest customers. Ironically, the growing importance of the cloud may actually be the salvation of the Lotus brand.

5. The appliance lives. Even as we look towards the cloud to wean us off of hardware, IBM is putting big bets on hardware appliances. It is actually a good strategy. Packaging all the piece parts onto an appliance that can be remotely upgraded and managed is a good sales strategy for companies cutting back on staff but still requiring capabilities.

There is a lot more that is important about this stage in IBM’s evolution as a company. If I had to sum up what I took away from this annual analyst software event is that IBM is focused at winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of the business leader looking for ways to innovate. That’s what Smarter Planet is about. Will IBM be able to juggle its place as a software leader with its push into business leadership? It is a complicated task that will take years to accomplish and even longer to assess its success.

Tectonic shifts: HP Plus 3Com versus Cisco Plus EMC

Just when it looked clear where the markets were lining up around data center automation and cloud computing, things change. I guess that is what makes this industry so very interesting.  The proposed acquisition by HP of 3Com is a direct challenge to Cisco’s network management franchise. However, the implications of this move go further than what meets the eye.  It also pits HP in a direct path against EMC with its Cisco partnership. And to make things even more interesting, it also puts these two companies in a competitive three way race against IBM and its cloud/data center automation strategy. And of course, it doesn’t stop there. A myriad of emerging companies like Google and Amazon want a larger share of the enterprise market for cloud services. Companies like Unisys and CSC that has focused on the outsourced secure data centers are getting into the act.

I don’t think that we will see a single winner — no matter what any one of these companies will tell you.  The winners in this market shift will be those companies can build a compelling platform and a compelling value proposition for a partner ecosystem.  The truth about the cloud is that it is not simply a network or a data center. It is a new way of providing services of all sorts that can support changing customer workloads in a secure and predictable manner.

In light of this, what does this say for HP’s plans to acquire 3Com? If we assume that the network infrastructure is a key component of an emerging cloud and data center strategy, HP is making a calculated risk in acquiring more assets in this market.  The company that has found that its ProCurve networking division has begun gaining traction. HP ProCurve Networking is the networking division of HP.  The division includes network switches, wireless access points, WAN routers, and Access Control servers and software.   ProCurve competes directly with Cisco in the networking switch market. When HP had a tight partnership with Cisco, the company de-emphasized the networking. However, once Cisco started to move into the server market, the handcuffs came off. The 3Com acquisition takes the competitive play to a new level. 3Com has a variety of good pieces of technology that HP could leverage within ProCurve. Even more significantly, it picks up a strong security product called TippingPoint, a 3Com acquisition. TippingPoint fills a critical hole in HP’s security offering. TippingPoint, offers network security offerings including intrusion prevention and a product that inspects network packets.  The former 3Com subsidiary has also established a database of security threats based a network of external researchers.

But I think that one of the most important reasons that HP bought 3Com is its strong relationships in the Chinese market. In fiscal year 2008 half of 3Com’s revenue came from its H3C joint venture with Chinese vendor, Huawei Technology. Therefore, it is not surprising that HP would have paid a premium to gain a foothold in this lucrative market. If HP is smart, it will do a good job leveraging the many software assets to build out both its networking assets as well as beefing up its software organization. In reality, HP is much more comfortable in the hardware market. Therefore, adding networking as a core competency makes sense. It will also bolster its position as a player in the high end data center market and in the private cloud space.

Cisco, on the other hand, is coming from the network and moving agressively into the cloud and the data center market.  The company has purchased a position with VMWare and has established a tight partnership with EMC as a go to market strategy.  For Cisco, it gives the company credibility and access to customers outside of its traditional markets. For EMC, the Cisco relationship strengthens its networking play.  But an even bigger value for the relationship is to present a bigger footprint to customers as they move to take on HP, IBM, and the assortment of other players who all want to win.  The Cisco/EMC/VMware play is to focus on the private cloud.  In their view a private cloud is very similar to a private, preconfigured data center.  It can be a compelling value proposition to a customer that needs a data center fast without having to deal with a lot of moving parts.  The real question from a cloud computing perspective is the key question: is this really a cloud?

It was inevitable that this quiet market dominated by Google and Amazon would heat up as the cloud becomes a real market force.  But I don’t expect that HP or Cisco/EMC will have a free run. They are being joined by IBM and Microsoft — among others. The impact could be better options for customers and prices that invariably will fall. The key to success for all of these players will be how well they manage what will be an increasingly heterogeneous, federated, and highly distributed hardware and software world. Management comes in many flavors: management of these highly distributed services and management of the workloads.

Is there a Twitter sneak attack in our future?

Last year I wrote a post about what I called the Google Sneak attack. If you don’t feel like reading that post, I’ll make it simple for you. Google comes to market as a benign helpful little search engine that threatened no one. Fast forward a decade and Google now pulls in more ad revenue than most of the television networks combined. It has attacked Microsoft’s office franchise, is playing a key role in the cloud via Platform as a Service (Google AppEngine), not to mention the importance of its entry into the book business and who knows what else.  But let’s turn our attention to Twitter.  I’ve been using Twitter since 2007. For the first several months I couldn’t quite figure out what this was all about. It was confusing and intriguing at the same time.  In fact, my first blog about Twitter suggested that the Emperor has no clothes.

So fast forward to the end of 2009 and several very interesting things are happening:

1. Twitter is becoming as much a part of the cultural and technical fabric as Google did just a few years ago

2. A partner ecosystem has grown up around Twitter. A post from February by Matt Ingram of Gigaom echos this point.

3. The number of individuals, large corporations, and small businesses are using Twitter as everything from the neighborhood water cooler to a sales channel.

What does mean? Despite detractors who wonder what you can possibly accomplish in 140 characters, it is becoming clear that this company without a published business plan does have a plan to dominate.  It is, in fact, the same strategy that Google had. Which company would have been threatened by a small search company? And who could be threatened from a strange little company called Twitter that asked people to say it all in 140 characters? Today Twitter claims to have 18 Million users about 4% of adult internet users.  I suspect that we will begin to see a slow but well orchestrated roll out of services that leverage the Twitter platform. I suspect that we will see a combination of advertising plus commercial software aimed at helping companies reach new customers in new channels.

I am confident that within the next two years this small, profitless, patient company will roll out a plan targeting social networking world dominance. It will be fun to watch.

Bureaucracy gone mad: when process gets in the way of service management

I had two interesting discussions over the past few weeks; one with an IT manager and the other with Rhett Glause and Matt French from Service-Now. Both discussions related to the issue of managing service processes in a complex computing environments.  Let me start with the IT manager. He is charged with taking his organization’s web presence from 1990s architecture into a modern Web 2.0 design that will enable better support for customers and partners.  It is a big effort with lots of interaction with the customer facing departments about what they want and with the IT organization about how this new environment will be supported.  Now, this part isn’t out of the ordinary and this is not what this manager was having problems with.  He was being driven crazy by process. The company he works for is devoted to ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). ITIL is a set of best practices designed to help companies create environments that have a common way to troubleshoot problems with managing complex services.  They are intended as guidelines – not step-by-step instructions about how to managing service processes. In fact, ITIL best practices mandate that you need to start with your strategy for managing services before you get involved in the details.

The IT manager’s problem is that his company’s IT department was so embroiled in process that it was causing excessive delays in getting to a solution. It has a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) —  a repository for all of the details about an application environment including who can change something; how a service or an application is configured and what the change management process is. This company’s problem is that it has set up a change review board that has to review and approve every change for the new environment.  Therefore, something that should take a few days to develop is taking six month of endless meetings.  In other words, the IT manager’s organization is too caught up in process so that it actually crippling the ability to get the job done.  According to the IT manager, “It’s bureaucracy gone mad! This approach will not help make IT more responsive; it will do the opposite.”

I thought about the discussion in context with a great call I had with Matt French, director of marketing and product strategy and Rhett Glauser, communications manager at Service-Now, an IT service desk software as a service company.  What did they think of my friend’s tale of woe? They agreed that this is a common perspective that they hear from customers.  Many customers are beginning to understand that they have to take a pragmatic view of process.  Their top recommendation was that companies should approach ITIL in a phrased approach.

So, here are some recommendations about how to handle process in context with driving business value:

• Establish a light-weight CMDB by only focusing on configuration items that the organization really needs. If a process isn’t likely to change, it might not be necessary to track that process.  You don’t need a change management process for everything.
• Get IT management to take a step back from relying too heavily on IT processes. Rather management needs to be focused on what is important to business management and then execute in a pragmatic way.
• Every service should have a business owner who can make decisions.
• When a change management process is required make sure that there is a change advisory board. There needs to be one person who has the authority to manage that change in the context of the business drivers. The change management board should expedite process and should not become a bottleneck.

In the end it is about common sense. If IT organizations are going to be effective in managing business requirements they have to look at service management in context with the overall priorities of the business. This was the key message our team was aiming for when we wrote Service Management for Dummies. Service management is increasingly defining not only how we manage IT environments but how we managed businesses. Therefore a streamlined view of process management will be the difference between success and failure.

Why all workloads don’t belong in the cloud

I had an interesting conversation with a CIO the other day about cloud computing. He had a simple question: I have an relatively old application and I want to move it to the cloud. How do I do that? I suspect that we will see a flurry of activity over the coming year where this question will be asked a lot.  And why not — the cloud is the rage and who wouldn’t want to demonstrate that with the cloud all problems are solved.  So, what was my answer to this CIO? Basically, I told him that all workloads do not belong in the cloud. It is not because this technically can’t be done. It can. It is quite possible to encapsulate an existing application and place it into a cloud environment so that new resources can be self-provisioned, etc. But, in reality, you have to look at this issue from an efficiency and an economic perspective.

Cloud computing gains an economic edge over a traditional data center when it supports a relatively small simple workload for a huge number of customers. For example, a singular workload like email or a payment service can be fairly optimized at all levels — the operating system, middleware, and the hardware can all be customized and tuned to support the workload. The economics favor this type of workload that support large numbers of customers. The same cannot be said for the poor aging Cobol application that is used by 10 people within an organization. While there might be incremental management productivity benefits, the cost/benefit analysis simply doesn’t work.

So, the answer is pretty simple. You just can’t throw every workload into the cloud. It is not a panacea for all IT problems.  Organizations that are trying to figure out what to do with these pesky old workloads need to look at three options:

1. Decide if that workload is still supporting business objectives in a cost effective manner. If it does the job, leave it alone.

2. That old workload might be better supported by traditional outsourcing. Let someone else keep the application alive while you move into more mission critical tasks.

3. Think about rebuilding that old workload — either by encapsulating key elements and placing them within a modular flexible environment. You might even discover that there are components that are actually useful across the organization. When you discover that sharing components across divisions/department is a productive and pragmatic approach, you might be ready to move those workloads into the cloud.

Is cloud security really different than data center security?

Almost every conversation I have had over the past year or so always comes back to security in the cloud.  Is it really secure? Or we are thinking about implementing the cloud but we are worried about security.  There are, of course, good reasons to plan a cloud security strategy. But in a sense, it is no different than planning a security strategy for your company. But it is the big scary cloud! Well, before I list the top then issues I would like to say one thing: if you think you need an entirely different security strategy for the cloud, you may not have a comprehensive security strategy to start with.  Yes, you have to make sure that you cloud provider has a sophisticated approach to security. However, what about your Internet service provider? What about the level of security within your own IT department? Can you throw stones if you live in a glass house (yes, that is a pun…sorry)?  So, before you start fretting about security in the cloud, get your own house in order.  Do you have an identity management plan? Do you ensure that one individual within the data center can’t control all of the data within a single environment to minimize risks? If you don’t have a well executed internal security plan, you aren’t ready for the cloud.  But let’s say that you have fixed that problem and you are ready to really plan your cloud security strategy. So, here five of the issues to consider. If you have others, let’s start a conversation.

1. You need to start at the beginning with understanding the characteristics of your cloud provider. Is the company well funded? Is its data center designed with security at the center? Your level of scrutiny will also depend on how you are using the cloud. If you are using Infrastructure as a Service for a short term project there is less risk than if you are planning to use a cloud to store important customer data.

2. How is your cloud provider implementing security in a multi-tenant environment? How do they ensure that one customer’s data doesn’t impact another customer’s data?

3. Does your cloud provider give you the ability to monitor security of your data in the cloud? This will be important both for compliance and to keep track of your own security policies.

4. Does your cloud provider encrypt your critical data? If not, why not?

5. Does your cloud provider give you the ability to control who is allowed to access your information based on roles and authorization? Does the cloud provider support federated identity management? This is basic security best practices.

Now you are probably saying to yourself that this isn’t rocket science. These are fundamental security approaches that any data center should follow. I recommend that you take a look at a great document published by the Cloud Security Alliance that details many of the key issues surrounding security in the cloud. So, I guess my principle message is that cloud security is not different than security in any data center.  But the market does not seem to understand this because the perception is that a cloud is somehow not a data center that can be secured with regular old security. I think that we will see something interesting happen because of this perception: cloud vendors will begin to charge a premium for really good security.  In fact, this is already happening.  Vendors like Amazon and Salesforce are offering segregated implementations of their environments to customers who don’t trust their ordinary security approaches.  This will work in the short term primarily because during this early phase of the cloud there is not enough focus on security. Long term, as the market matures, cloud vendors will have to demonstrate their ability to provide a secure environment based on basic security best practices. In the meantime, cloud vendors will rake in the cash for premium secure cloud services.

Unintended consequences of the cloud – part II

As I was pointing out yesterday, there are many unintended consequences from any emerging technology platform — the cloud will be no exception. So, here are my next three picks for unintended consequences from the evolution of cloud computing:

4. The cloud will disrupt traditional computing sales models. I think that Larry Ellison is right to rant about Cloud Computing. He is clearly aware that if cloud computing becomes the preferred way for customers to purchase software the traditional model of paying maintenance on applications will change dramatically.  Clearly,  vendors can simply roll in the maintenance stream into the per user per month pricing. However, as I pointed out in Part I, prices will inevitably go down as competition for customers expands. There there will come a time when the vast sums of money collected to maintain software versions will seem a bit old fashioned. In fact, that will be one of the most important unintended consequences and will have a very disruptive effect on the economic models of computing. It has the potential to change the power dynamics of the entire hardware and software industries.The winners will be the customers and smart vendors who figure out how to make money without direct maintenance revenue. Like every other unintended consequence there will be new models emerging that will emerge that will make some really cleaver vendors very successful. But don’t ask me what they are. It is just too early to know.

5. The market for managing cloud services will boom. While service management vendors do pretty well today managing data center based systems, the cloud environment will make these vendors king of the hill.  Think about it like this. You are a company that is moving to the cloud. You have seven different software as a service offerings from seven different vendors. You also have a small private cloud that you use to provision critical customer data. You also use a public cloud for some large scale testing. In addition, any new software development is done with a public cloud and then moved into the private cloud when it is completed. Existing workloads like ERP systems and legacy systems of record remain in the data center. All of these components put together are the enterprise computing environment. So, what is the service level of this composite environment? How do you ensure that you are compliant across these environment? Can you ensure security and performance standards? A new generation of products and maybe a new generation of vendors will rake in a lot of cash solving this one.

6. What will processes look like in the cloud. Like data, processes will have to be decoupled from the applications that they are an integral part of the applications of record. Now I don’t expect that we will rip processes out of every system of record. In fact, static systems such as ERP, HR, etc. will have tightly integrated processes. However, the dynamic processes that need to change as the business changes will have to be designed without these constraints. They will become trusted processes — sort of like business services that are codified but can be reconfigured when the business model changes.  This will probably happen anyway with the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures. However, with the flexibility of cloud environment, this trend will accelerate. The need to have independent process and process models may have the potential of creating a brand new market.

I am happy to add more unintended consequences to my top six. Send me your comments and we can start a part III reflecting your ideas.

What are the unanticipated consequences of Cloud Computing- Part I

Maybe I am just obsessed with cloud computing these days. I guess that after spending more than 18 months researching the topic for our forthcoming book, Cloud Computing for Dummies, I can be excused for my obsession.  Now that I am able to take a step back from the noise of the market, I have been thinking about what this will mean in the next ten years. Consequences of technology adoption are never what we expect. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s no one could imagine why anyone would want a personal computer. In fact, the only application people could imagine for a PC was a way to store recipes (I am not making this up). Keep in mind that this was before the first PC-based spreadsheet was designed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Franston(That’s them in the picture) . No one in those days could have predicted that everyone from a CEO to a three year old child would own a personal computer and its use would change the way we conduct business.  (I never did find a recipe storing application).

The same logic can be applied to the Internet. While the Internet has been used 40 years ago by researchers, it was not a commercially viable option until the mid-1990s. In the early days of the Internet it was a sophisticated communications technology with a command line interface. Once the browser came along, businesses tended to use it to share price lists, marketing materials, and job postings. There were certainly message boards but only for the real techies. There were environments such as The Well which was the first online community used primarily by academics and wild-eyed researchers.

In that context, I was thinking about what we might expect to happen with cloud computing? There is a lot to say, so I decided to break this into two parts — each one will have three consequences. Here are today’s top three:

1. Cloud computing will begin to change the way we think of an application. To be truly useful to large groups of individuals and businesses requires economies of scale in terms of massively scaled workloads. The only way to accomplish this is either to cherry pick a few big workloads (like email) or to branch out. That branching out is inevitable and will mean that vendors with cloud offerings with componentize their software offerings into modular services that can be mixed and matched with other services.

2. The prices that vendors will charge for cloud computing services will drop dramatically over the next few years. As prices drop it will become a lot more economically viable to substitute on premise environment for the cloud environment. Today this is not the case; large companies supporting thousands of users in an application environment cannot justify the movement to a cloud platform. What if the costs drop to the point where the economics (with the right workloads) favor cloud based services? When this happens there will be a tipping point that we might not even notice for a few years. But I predict that it will happen. We are already seeing Amazon dropping prices for its EC2 environment based on the competitive threat from Microsoft Azure services announcement.

3. The cloud will change the way we manage data. The traditional way we think about data neatly stored in specific databases to handle a specific business problem will inevitably change.  This won’t be an overnight change but it will happen. Data will increasingly be seen as a reusable resource that can be used in lots of different situations. There will continue to be strategic line of business applications but they will be more systems of record that keep track of the final result of actions that take place dynamically in the cloud. The value of data is not in its tight packaging as we have been used to for decades but it the flexibility to move, transform, and leverage data. The watch word for data in this new model will be Trusted Data in the Cloud.

I would love to know what you think of my top three choices; send me your comments and I will add them to my list for tomorrow.

As we deal with the cloud hype it is too easy to be dismissive and cynical. But we always treat complicated new trends that way — until one day they become the normal way of business and life.

Can we free process and data?

I am still at IBM’s Information on Demand conference here in Las Vegas (not my favorite place..but what can you do). In listening to a lot of discussions around strategy and products I started thinking about one of the key problems that customers are facing around business process and managing increasingly complex data. What companies really want to do is to have the flexibility and freedom to leverage their critical data across applications and situations. They also want to be able to change processes based on changing business models.

This is the core issue that companies will be facing in the coming decade and will be the difference between success and failure for many  businesses.  Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s take the example of a retailer in a competitive market. Let’s say our retailer had five or six applications: Accounting, Human Resources, supply chain management, a customer support system, and a customer facing e-commerce system. Each of these systems has an underlying database; each one manages this data based on the business process that is the foundation of the best practices that is the value of these packages. Even if each of the packages are the best in their markets there is a core problem since each solution is a silo. Processes that move between these systems tend to fall through the cracks.  This is why we, as customers of such retailers, are often frustrated when we call about a product that wasn’t delivered, doesn’t work, or requires a change only to discover that one department has no ability to know what is happening in another area. For most companies the dream of single view of the customer is aspirational but not practical right now. In reality, it is hard for companies to mess with their existing applications. These solutions are customized for their business environment; they were expensive and complicated to implement — and change is hard. In fact, companies only change when it is more painful to stay with the status quo than it is to change. In a retail scenario, companies change their approach to process and data management when they must change their business model because the current processes will lead to failure. Retailers are currently faced with emerging approaches to selling and managing customer relationships that are challenging traditional selling models.  Look what a company like Amazon.com or Netflex have done to their slower moving competitors.

A number of customers I have spoken with understand this very well. They are looking at ways to separate their core data assets from the underlying applications. Many of these customers are at the forefront of implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to managing their software assets. They are increasingly understanding that the secret to their future success is the knowledge they have about their customers, their needs and future requirements within their own set of offerings and those from partners. These companies are setting a priority of making this data independent, secure, and accurate. These business leaders are preparing for inevitable change.  At the same time, I have seen these customers creating SOA business services that are, in essence, codified business processes. For example, a business service could be a process that checks the credit of a potential partner or links a new customer request for service to the set of applications that confirms the request, orders the part, and notifies a partner.

So, here is the problem. These customers are implementing this new model of abstracting data and process based on specific projects or business initiatives.  These projects have gotten the attention of the C-team because of the impact on revenue. But, in reality, the real breakthrough will happen when the separation of data and process are the rule, not the exception.

This is going to be the overriding challenge for the next decade because it is so hard. There is inertia to move away from the predictable packaged applications that companies have implemented for more than 30 years. But I suggest that it will be inevitable that companies will begin to understand that if they are going to remain agile and change processes when they anticipate a competitive threat. These same companies will understand that their data is too important to leave it locked inside an application linked tightly to a process.

I don’t have the answers about what the tipping point will be when this starts to become a wide spread strategy. I think that the cloud will became a forcing action that will accelerate this trend. I would love to start a dialog. Send me your thoughts and I promise to post them.

Can IBM turn information management upside down?

I am here at IBM’s IOD (Information on Demand) conference. The keynote is interesting because of the focus on outcomes. IBM has invested more than $12 billion over the past five years in the information management market. More than $8 billion has come through acquisitions (Cognos, SPSS, etc.) and the rest from organic growth.

The biggest changes that I have seen over the past 20 years or so of watching IBM in the information technology market is the change in focus from the database engine and tools to a focus on a process centric approach to information management. In essence, this means that IBM is building a foundation based on outcomes through the lifecycle of information. Last year IBM called this movement to using information holistically to help companies anticipate the future the Information Agenda. Now, there is an interesting and subtle shift to what IBM is calling information-led transformation.  What’s the difference? I think that IBM is actually attempting to turn the information management market upside down.  There is no doubt that data and information management is a technical discipline. What IBM is saying is that the focus is on business transformation that is supported by information management technology. It is a subtle difference but really important. It is very easy to get caught up in the details about schemas, data cleansing, etc. But if information doesn’t support key business processes and business strategy needs, it is just a pile of technology.

With the growth of social networks, an ever expanding world of information sources – structured, unstructured, images, video, data feeds, and more, it is more important than ever that these sources of data be managed in context with the business goals.  The movement to cloud computing will add a lot more information to the mix.  It is going to be a complex journey. One only has to look at complexities of managing information in the healthcare industry to start to understand what the implications for managing costs and lives. Today we cannot easily look across information across individual doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, patients, medical equipment, digital images, and more. We don’t have consistent definitions of data; nor can we keep track of how effective a treatment might impact individuals with a symptom. Nor do we have the ability today to use information to determine what solutions could be used to reduce medical errors by 5% a year. If healthcare information management were focused on predicting outcomes rather than creating the next report, image what we could accomplish.