On the democratization of Business Intelligence

What a great event! The IBM & Fordham event at the Graduate School of Business was full of insights for managers, students and academics interested in analytics. It highlighted the business value of analytics and the on-going business transformation enabled by Business Intelligence.

Some little bits of insight in random order:

- Business is not an intuition game anymore, everything is driven and enabled by data.

- When it comes to analytics, technology is often ahead of culture, rather than the other way around. So IT needs to "pull" the business.

- Smart users of analytics outperform their lesser-smart peers.

- Information should be constantly seen as strategic asset within business processes. Many executives understand accounting, financials etc. but they fail to "understand information".

- Building on the right architecture and digital platforms, analytics provide the highest benefit when real-time integrated data are combined with cross-boundary teams of experts, and when the organization constantly links activities with results.

- Analytics is a growth area for career opportunities, and students with the right mix of business and technical skills will be the next generation of business leaders. It was mentioned that IBM has at least 2,500 open job positions related to analytics.

- The increasing significance of analytics today is associated with explosion of data, the need to increase the performance of each and every decision, and the democratization of business intelligence - all organizations, independent of size and sector, have the opportunity to leverage advanced analytics capabilities and optimize their business performance.

- The main question arises: "now that we have the data, can we connect the dots?" (possibly the notorious financial crisis of 2008-09 suggests that even financial firms that are heavy users of IT are not there yet in terms of connecting the dots)

Check the press release by IBM.

Smarter Education: An Era of Opportunity (Fordham event on Dec. 9th)

- Fordham University and IBM Collaborate to Prepare Students for the New Wave of Jobs

On Wednesday, December 9, Fordham University and IBM will gather leaders from academia, the venture capital community, government and the health care industry to discuss the coming wave of new jobs that will require analytics skills.

A recent Global CIO Study revealed that 83 percent of executives ranked business analytics -- the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insight -- as their top priority. At the same time, with $1.8 trillion being spent worldwide on economic stimulus -- analytics technologies will be needed to make sense of the information coming from new infrastructures that are on the way.

Together, these developments offer an opportunity for students to develop new skills to apply analytics to the country’s most complex business and societal challenges.

Recent reports state that if training and education programs do not continue, we may see a skills shortage as the economy rebounds and the technology needs of both the private sector and government agencies increases.

Prominent leaders will be on hand including Kamal Bherwani, CIO, New York Health and Human Services, Bob Himmelberg, Dean, Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration, Donna Rapaccioli, Dean, Fordham College of Business Administration, Evangelos Simoudis, Managing Director, Trident Capital, Jonathan Bowles, Director, Center for an Urban Future and Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, Business Analytics and Process Optimization, IBM,

When : Wednesday, December 9 Time : 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.

Where : Fordham University, Lowenstein Building at Lincoln Center in NYC (12 th Floor Lounge)
113 W. 60th Street (at Columbus Ave) NY, NY 10023
RSVP : fordham@us.ibm.com

ICS Faculty : Professors Mark Silver - area chair, Evangelos Katsamakas, RP Raghupathi, Aditya Saharia, Wei Gao, Yabing Jiang, Young-Eun Lee, Robert Chiang

Business 2.0 Student Club : Scott Greenfield, Ann Bobel, Chia Chia Yeh

*A light breakfast will be available starting at 9:00 a.m.

Fordham CIO Roundtable: Enterprise 2.0 (Nov. 20th 2009)

Abha Kumar from Vanguard Group gave an excellent presentation about Enterprise 2.0 in Vanguard at our latest Fordham CIO Roundtable meeting.

Enterprise 2.0 is about the use of Web 2.0 technologies (like social technologies and media, blogs, wikis, etc.) at the enterprise level. It is about communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Fundamentally, Enterprise 2.0 is about "breaking barriers" within and across companies, and this is a journey that is just beginning. It is great to see financial firms--traditionally maximal-control organizations due to culture and regulations -- to consider openness initiatives and to have a strong conviction that this is "the future". Another great example of the power of IT to transform all aspects of business and to create the future!

The great presentation spawned a lively discussion about Enterprise 2.0 in Financial firms and related obstacles (e.g. legal department...), cost-allocation issues, and opportunities.

As usual, the meeting of the Fordham CIO Roundtable took place at Fordham's Lincoln Center location (Lowenstein Hall, 113 W. 60th Street). Participants include many CIOs and IT execs and managers from the greater NY area and faculty members of the Information and Communication Systems (ICS) area of Fordham U. Business Schools. The CIO Roundtable is co-ordinated by Professor Aditya Saharia and it meets once per month.

Once upon a time, there was the Internet

Comment (written testimony) submitted to NYC Council, Tech in Government Committee, Hearing on Net Neutrality, Nov 20, 2009

The Internet has been a tremendous transformational technology and democratizing force in its short 40 years. An open network platform, it enabled an economic revolution democratizing the opportunity to innovate and to create new companies. Computers gave us processing power, the Internet multiplied that with the power of networks.

Historically and by-design, network providers (carriers) provide access to the platform, but they do not control what users can access and what application and content providers are allowed to offer on the Internet platform. In other words users have the “freedom of access”. Innovation-communities, like Wikipedia, and companies, start-ups and established alike, have the “freedom to experiment and innovate” creating value through new services and new business models.

You, as a user, wouldn’t like your network provider choosing which search engine you will use, or which social network you will access. You wouldn’t like your network provider to choose which website will be accessible at low speeds and which at high speeds. You would not like to have something like-Internet access that is not really Internet access. You would not like to have a choice between connecting to AT&T-net or to Verizon-net, but not to the whole Internet as we know it.

You, as an entrepreneur and innovator, wouldn’t like the network providers choosing what customers you will have access to. You wouldn’t like the network providers choosing who the most innovative company is and who offers the best service. You wouldn’t like network providers to start experimenting with discrimination that “closes” the platform, establishes “gatekeepers”, distorts the economics of the network, and weakens incentives for economic innovation.

I absolutely stress the importance of establishing clear openness rules that will maintain the essential characteristics of the Internet as a platform for economic innovation, social interaction, cultural progress, civic engagement, education and freedom. We wouldn’t like to see the Internet becoming a short-lived historical accident.

Evangelos Katsamakas is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Fordham University Schools of Business in New York. (Katsamakas@fordham.edu)

November 20, 2009

Godgle

If Nietzsche visited the earth one century after his time, he would have probably proclaimed "godgle is again alive!"

Warped by Internet's force

A business or industry warped by Internet's force can never go back to its original dimensions.

Barrett's meta-law

Moore's law is the driving force of the IT industry for the last 40 years, roughly stating that computing power doubles almost every 2 years. That exponential rate of change in processing power diffuses eventually into communications, storage, software applications, business processes, business models, and wider transformation of industry and society. In other words, Moore's law, an observation made in the 60's by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel corporation, summarizes the essence of our Internet and information-driven age.

I call Barrett's meta-law an observation made by Craig Barrett, Intel's soon-to-retire chairman, in a recent WSJ article[1]. Barrett's meta-law is a clear and compeling statement: "Don't mess with Moore's law". It is a meta-law, because it is a law about a law.

According to Barret, companies that disregard the meta-law face destructive consesquences. Evidently breaking the meta-law would also have a disruptive effect on the IT industry and all the adjacent tech-enabled industries.

On the other hand society as a whole, might be better off slowing down a bit its breath-taking pace of socio-technical change.

Other lessons from Intel's chairman on tech leadership:

- Invest during hard times: important but easy to forget in the current economic environment

- Follow the business, not wall-street: manage with a long-term horizon not myopically

- It pays to have good competitors

- Be a proponent of larger-than-business causes, e.g. support education, and basic research

References

[1] WSJ article, Weekend 16-17 May 2009