Anyway, how can it be a definitive list if it doesn't include Sir Clive Sinclair's electric vehicle of the 80s, the C5? The C5 had a range between charges as low as six miles, and you had to pedal to get it to go up hills. Little wonder Sinclair Vehicles ended up bankrupt.

Maybe an electric vehicle is not considered a gadget though? How are you defining gadget? Wikipedia says, "A gadget is a device that has a useful specific practical purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology. In some circles the distinction between a gadget and a gizmo is that a gizmo has moving parts, whereas a gadget need not have them." Ah, so the C5 is more a gizmo than a gadget.

Surprisingly, there weren't many products that are technology or IT-related. The highest ranking techno-gadget, indeed, is the Sony MiniDisc player, ranked as the fourteenth most useless gadget. I must say I was a bit thrown by that one, too.

First off, it's not a British product yet the survey says it sought to find "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and secondly, I can't quite see why it is such a useless product.

It may not be easy to buy the latest albums on MiniDisc, it's true, and you could argue the technology has been made obsolete by the iPod and its ilk. But the fourteenth most useless gadget? More useless, according to the survey, than egg slicers, electric tin openers and towel warmers?

I might have to start a MiniDisc supporters club in protest, although I would feel something of a fraud as I confess I have never been the proud owner of a MiniDisc (though if I had, I would have been very, very proud, and not kept thinking what a useless gadget it was, honest).

Besides, a MiniDisc player has moving parts, so doesn't that make it a gizmo, and not a gadget?

Anyway, what was the most useless gadget according to the survey?...

Other surprises on the list include the SodaStream. OK, so I agree that the stuff that comes out of a Soda Stream (yes, I did once own one, or rather, I occupied a residence in which a SodaStream was owned) rarely tasted like the 'soda' it was meant to mimic. It didn't matter whether you were aiming for cola, lemonade or soda water, what you get is sugary water that bubbles slightly for approximately 17 seconds and looks like rust. Then it goes flat, leaving you with flat sugary rust-coloured water.

But, on the other hand, anything invented in 1903 (by Guy Gilbey, according to Wikipedia) that is still being bought today (visit www.sodastream.co.uk if you don't believe me) can't be all that bad. Anyway, why should you outsource your fizzy drinks manufacture to Coca Cola or Pepsi when you can make them yourself at home? In fact, come to think of it, why not make your own clothes too, and fashion your own furniture from old crates instead of going to Ikea? Think of how much time you would save, no longer having to decipher those flat-pack-assembly instructions!

I digress. Here's the rest of the gadgets on the list.

TOP 20 MOST POINTLESS GADGETS

1. Electric nail files
2. Laser guided scissors
3. Electric candles
4. Soda stream
5. Foot spas
6. Fondue set
7. Hair crimpers
8. Egg boiler
9. Electric fluff remover
10. Electric carving knife
11. Trouser press
12. Face steamers
13. Teas made
14. Mini disk player
15. Facial tanners
16. Egg slicer
17. Electric tin openers
18. Yoghurt makers
19. Towel warmer
20. Back scratcher

But what's this? A quote on the press release from Chris Winstanley, spokesman for www.reevoo.com: "Some gadgets are really useful but this poll proves that many of them end up being a waste of money. Reading genuine reviews can tell you if a gadget or gizmo is likely to be the best thing you ever bought or something that gets stuck in a cupboard and forgotten about within a week."

Ha! "Gadget or gizmo"! Which is it Chris? Moving parts, or no moving parts? 20 most pointless gadgets, or 20 most pointless gadgets/gizmos?

I reckon I can come up with a far more pointless list myself, including both gadgets and gizmos, and being up-front about the gizmo inclusion, too. While I'm working on it, drop me a comment below if you can think of a pointless gadget or gizmo I should put on my list. And before you suggest it, my blog is neither a gadget nor a gizmo.

UPDATE: Chris got in touch (luckily he has a sense of humour) to say the survey was intended to find the most useless gadgets according to Brits, not the most useless British gadgets. So the MiniDisc is valid, even if it's pretty useless (according to the survey). Thanks Chris.

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“Long term, de-dupe is likely to become a storage fundamental, for all areas of storage,” Biles told me. It may be sooner than that...

Diligent's technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group.

“Diligent develops in-line data de-duplication software that is integrated with server and storage infrastructures to help organizations significantly reduce the amount and cost of physical storage required in data centres,” said Big Blue. “Enterprise and mid-sized organizations are faced with data centres that are reaching a breaking point of complexity and manageability, while at the same time experiencing explosive demands for storage for new data, transactions, email and back-up files.”

As companies continue to struggle with their exploding volumes of data, they are looking for ways of increasing storage density without buying additional capacity. De-duplication is one way of doing that, and the big storage vendors want a piece of the action.

“The Diligent acquisition will be an important part of IBM's New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth,” said IBM. “The new model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.”

IBM is not yet saying that it will include de-duplication technologies free when it sells storage, but as competition in the storage space evolves, there’s bound to be pressure on standalone de-duplication vendors, Data Domain included. Further consolidation is on the cards, in my view.

I’d liken it to the ability to store objects in relational databases: at one time there were numerous firms making a living doing object-oriented databases before the relational database firms developed their own or acquired similar capabilities. And what became of the object-oriented firms like Objectivity, Versant, ODI and ObjectStore?

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Now that he is the chief strategy officer of BPM firm Cordys, it looks like that vision is finally turning into a reality.

I just noticed that there’s a beta programme underway at www.theprocessfactory.com, powered by Cordys. I’ve not seen any press releases on this so yeagh, you read it here first.

“We have released the Beta of The Process Factory Solution to a private group of beta testers,” it says on the site. “All beta testers will get full access to Online Composer, with which they can easily build and run process centric applications, right inside their browsers.”

It lists a whole host of sample business processes that it says users will be able to build using the Online Composer, from asset management, to case handling and sales quote approval. It will be interesting to see whether, assuming the beta is a success and it gets something usable into production, The Process Factory powered by Cordys could start to get up a head of steam in on-demand BPM that salesforce.com did in on-demand CRM.

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So what’s the plan? Why does a company that has the upper echelons of the storage market so neatly sewn up want to pay $213m for a storage company that’s mostly a consumer/prosumer play?

Sure, there’s a certain amount of insulation in the sense that data volumes are still exploding, so there’s a limit to how much companies can pare back storage spending, but they could still try. The Symmetrix is akin to a Rolls Royce: the ultimate in protection and reliability. Companies could start going for a Mondeo until their budgets ease up a little, or they could switch investment to virtualization and de-duplication technologies that help them get more from their existing infrastructure.

So getting into the consumer and small business space gives EMC a little more diversified portfolio, which may even out some of the lumpiness it may see in its higher end accounts. The firm is creating a new division to house Iomega: it will form the core of EMC’s new Consumer/Small Business Products Division. Don’t be surprised to see EMC pick up some more consumer or small business storage or information management software technologies to flesh out this division further.

It’s not the first time EMC has remodeled itself. It started life selling memory, long before it got into storage arrays. After that it was a one-trick pony for a time, specializing in its Symmetrix line at the high-end. It changed its stripes again when it bought Data General to get its hands on DG’s Clariion mid-range boxes, and since then it’s also changed considerably by developing more of its own, as well as buying a range of software, such as Documentum, RSA and Network Intelligence.

So while investors may see EMC’s Iomega buy as a sign that EMC thinks its higher-end storage market is likely to provide less rich pickings going forward, perhaps that shouldn’t concern them too much. EMC is no stranger to reinventing itself, and it’s done pretty well so far, as it’s moved from storage, to information management, to secure information management.

Maybe the higher-end is a little more saturated, and maybe competition from rival virtualization, de-duplication and commodity storage is hurting a little more than it was two years ago. But EMC may just be about to show the world how to sell storage and information management to consumers and small businesses. Observers have been wrong to write them off in the past, and they will almost certainly be wrong to write them off now.

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SOA means a lot of different things, depending on who you ask. Let's talk for a moment about SOA's role in the application development arena, which most would now term the application lifecycle.

Before SOA was introduced as a concept, there were plenty of problems in application development. I'm going to lump these into three areas: demand, delivery, and management. SOA doesn't fix any of them, in fact it can make them far worse.

Starting with demand -- the earliest stage in which a business identifies that it has a requirement that it needs IT's help to fulfil -- there was a communication gap between the business stakeholders and the IT department’s developers and development managers or developers-cum-analysts.

Business people are notoriously bad at fully and accurately describing just what it is they are trying to do in terms that the IT experts can fathom.

IT experts are equally bad at translating business requirements into specifications for what they are actually going to build, and even worse at translating those specifications back into something that the business can understand sufficiently to know whether o give them the go-ahead to start building the prototypes.

SOA doesn't solve either of these problems. SOA has not provided a miracle shared vocabulary that both the business and IT experts can agree covers what each needs to understand about the business. So at the demand stage of any SOA-driven development cycle, there are the same problems of miscommunication of requirements and specifications that preceded SOA.

Business people may be more comfortable talking about the services that they want built for them than talking about the heterogeneous mix of databases, application servers and interfaces that go into building the system.

But with an SOA approach, the developers are thinking about services specifications built with standards like Java, .Net, BPEL, SOAP and XML that are still meaningless to the business users.

With SOA developers may not need to worry about such fine-grained components that were the norm previously, in the era of component-based development (I'm thinking the likes of CORBA and DCOM). But the granularity of the SOA-era components; EJBs, BPEL transactions, XSLT style guides, still have business people baffled.

SOA doesn't necessarily close the communication gap in the delivery stage of the application lifecycle.

DELIVERY

This is the stage at which developers have actually built something, and they are ready to put it into production. Historically, the problems here stem from the problems in the earlier demand stage of the lifecycle.

The developers have either built the wrong thing or only solved half of the problem. Traditionally, the business sends the developers back to the drawing board to try again -- there are usually multiple attempts at getting it right -- so is this stage easier to do quickly when the system has been underpinned by web services and SOA? It's unlikely.

When developers built their systems using fine-grained components (or even before component-based development) developers could go back to their designs and modify fine-grained components or just chunks of code without worrying too much about how those changes affected other ongoing development projects reliant on more coarse-grained services.

Now with SOA, the systems may be a mashup of web services, so if the application is to change they may need to consider how that affects other, parallel services developments in the organisation.

In a worst-case scenario, they may need to swap out existing services they found in the services repository with other services that do now meet the new business requirement as they understand it.

Worse still, the new understanding of the requirements may not have any alternative underlying services in the repository, forcing developers to build one or more new services from scratch -- while any new services builds should adhere to the IT department’s policy on encapsulation, standards, potential for reuse and so on.

What the IT department promised to the enterprise with delivery of a matter of weeks or months because they believed they could deliver it by mashing up existing services, suddenly needs a lot more time as they realise they must build new services too.

Again, the business cares less about whether what is delivered to them was developed more efficiently because it is a mashup -- they just want it delivered in a way that meets all their expectations, and they still want it delivered according to the original target go-live date.

The delivery of applications and systems to the satisfaction of business stakeholders is not solved by SOA; in fact an SOA approach could even add to delays in getting the functionality delivered.

MANAGEMENT & SCOPE CREEP

Let's look at the third element I have earmarked in the application lifecycle: management.

Before SOA, managing application development projects was no easy task, it's true. Depending on the granularity of the application development approach prior to the adoption of SOA, it was not always easy to break development projects into piecemeal parts in order to get them built by distributed development teams inside and outside the organisation.

SOA itself does little to help here. The chunks may be larger, but project managers must now also pay lip service to the corporate standards for services development: again, things like choice of tools vendor, standards, reusability and documentation.

They now have a repository and registry of services to think about, and they may need to be mindful about SOA governance -- who 'owns' certain services, services version control, security implications of shared services and what impact changes to underlying services have on each of their live applications that rely on them.

SOA doesn't solve the challenges of managing application development projects. Indeed it adds another dimension where the manager must be mindful of the change impact of their own and other services built inside or outside the organisation on the applications and systems they deliver to the business.

Once the application is delivered, much of the systems management and service level management technologies that helped the IT department keep track of bottlenecks, errors or outright outages are more advanced for more traditional applications infrastructures than they are for SOA deployments.

Visibility into databases, application servers and front ends is a solved problem thanks to the systems management vendors. But management visibility into systems and applications comprised of shared services is a more nascent field. The systems management and business service management vendors are catching up, but setting up management reports that the business requires to handle shared services inside and outside the business sill takes considerable work.

Don’t get me wrong. SOA done right can have huge benefits: the likes of re-use, the ability to more easily produce composite applications or ‘mashups’, even some improvement in the shared vocabulary between business and IT.

My point is that if you don’t get the fundamental challenges of application development under control first, SOA can be even more challenging than more traditional component-based development approaches.

The answer? IT governance – call it SOA governance if you wish – and business process management (BPM). IT governance is a must-have for SOA to work. Meanwhile BPM, to my mind at least, adds an essential veneer atop SOA that helps to abstract away some of the difficulties I have outlined in the requirements/demand stage, and even more of them when it comes to delivery and ongoing management.

In chapter 2 of this essay I’ll look in more detail at why SOA governance is so vital for the success of SOA-based strategies. Look out, too, for CBR’s forthcoming special report on BPM in which I’ll delve deeper into my views on why BPM is essential for SOA (despite the fact I don’t believe SOA is a pre-requisite for BPM).

As always, your feedback is most welcome.

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First we need to establish what Carr actually said. He said that what he calls "infrastructural technologies" would become ubiquitous in the not-too-distant future. As he puts it, "as their availability increases and their cost decreases - as they become ubiquitous - they become commodity inputs."

But is becoming a commodity the same as no longer mattering -- of no longer holding any importance? I believe that Oracle’s acquisition of BEA for $8.5bn is just one proof-point for the fact that infrastructural technologies are anything but commodity.

Not only do they still matter, they matter more and more to companies for whom integration – between data, systems and applications – is the biggest thing holding back many strategic projects.

Carr is right that there is constant evolution in all areas of technology, and that technologies that once held competitive advantage become a little less of a differentiator once they are readily and cheaply available to all.

But even with technologies that have become commoditised by virtue of being cheaply and readily available, there is still the question of exactly how those technologies are applied. Even the best tools, if not woven successfully into the fabric of a firm’s business processes, have the potential to do more harm than good.

For example, a survey a couple of years ago of 600 employees at blue chip companies in the UK by Priority Management, found that 11% of employees consider email to be the cause of most disruption to their working day. But for many other staff, email clearly has the ability to dramatically boost productivity.

The other thing that Carr underestimates is the pace of change in IT. IT is not static. There are constant inventions, improvements and combinations of existing technologies that once again create the potential to boost competitive advantage. For every technology that Carr would say has become commoditized, another is around the corner that only early adopters will benefit from.

When Carr wrote his paper about infrastructural technologies becoming commoditised, for instance, the Enterprise Service Bus and the SOA Registry/Repository were just emerging. Today they are far more mature and perhaps even to some extent commoditised, yet they still matter to those who have built their SOA infrastructures around them.

As for technology as a whole, I believe it matters more, to more people, than ever. Here's why...

In the enterprise, business users’ expectations of what IT should do for them are higher than ever, thanks at least in part to their positive experience with consumer technologies that feature in the enterprise too. ‘Why can’t I find documents in my company as fast as I can find them on the Internet with Google?’ they may well ask.

IT matters to business people more than ever. Portable email, unified communications, enterprise search, content management and business intelligence, to name just a few, are all key to them making fast, well-informed decisions.

In the developing world the One Laptop Per Child scheme is just one example of the realization that IT, and connectivity to the Internet, can make a huge difference to children’s education. But for adults in these geographies too, IT has the power to deliver their goods and services faster, and further, than ever. To share information and ideas, and to express their very freedom.

IT even still matters in the developed world, where Carr’s argument that infrastructural technologies are commodity and no longer matter is easier to defend.

When Virgin Media, formed though the merger of Virgin Mobile and NTL Telewest lost 46,000 customers in its first quarter of 2007 despite spending £25m on advertising, it partly blamed poorly integrated billing and customer systems for the problems.

Virgin Media duly invested in some more integration technology – “infrastructural”, as Carr would say, but clearly still mattering not only to Virgin Media, but also its competitors to whom those defecting customers had turned.

Getting the technology right may matter more than whether or not it is cheap and available. But either way, I believe IT most definitely still matters. It matters more, to more people, than ever.

Four years ago I wrote a blog about Carr's article and subsequent book here.

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It’s not yet known just how much of a premium Microsoft is willing to pay for that exclamation mark at the end of Yahoo’s name, but analysts are already saying the exclamation mark was a “deal-maker” for Microsoft.

A senior Gartner analyst has been quoted as saying, “Look, Microsoft could have gone for Google since Micosoft’s market cap is over $287bn and Google is a miserly $121.3bn. But Google doesn’t have an exclamation mark in its trademark, and sources say that Gates and Ballmer particularly liked the impact and energy that the exclamation mark brings to Yahoo!’s brand.”

“We expect Google to react in turn by changing its name to Google!, or perhaps just Goog!, in order to step up its own brand awareness in the fight for brand equity (12% probability),” said the analyst. “Our advice to users is to wait and see how the dust settles, but we would note that Microsoft Vista is a more secure and robust operating system than Windows XP, if that helps.”

OK so Gartner didn’t say any such thing. But it might do, I reckon. They just need some time to digest the news and do a full exclamation-mark-brand-value-analysis-Magic-Quadrant, but because there are so few companies with an exclamation mark in their name, the upper right hand corner is looking pretty lonely. Especially now that Yahoo! won’t be in it either.

Of course the obvious thing to say is that this is Microsoft seriously stepping up its rivalry with Google. And if anyone is going to state the obvious, I'm your man.

Let’s be clear though, Yahoo!, with its exclamation mark, is worth $44.6bn to Microsoft. Google’s market cap on Nasdaq is around $121.3bn. And Google doesn’t even have an exclamation mark. All it has is world dominance when it comes to advertising-driven Internet search, a robust enterprise search business and a whole plethora of related applications that look a more and more serious threat to Microsoft every day that passes.

In a nutshell? Microsoft + Yahoo! = $331.6bn market cap. Google = $121.3bn market cap. Google won the advertising-search war, but if this deal closes, Microsoft has just closed the gap. But it's cost it 15% of its business to do it, when it should have been innovative enough to do it itself.

So for all the procedures in place about securing laptops to desks when in the office; not leaving them in cars or in the back of cabs while out of the office; or even about the levels of sensitivity of information that should be stored on laptops in the first place; none of these can ultimately prevent laptops getting lost or stolen.

The only answer now, indeed the only answer has always been, that any laptops containing sensitive information should be securely encrypted.

Finally, even the government and its various departments are starting to accept this. But this realization has come at a very heavy price: you only have to look at how HMRC lost two discs with 25 million people’s records on them, or the even more recent loss by the Ministry of Defence...

Not long before that, the MoD confirmed two earlier laptop losses: one a Royal Navy system stolen in October 2006, and one a laptop stolen from an Army recruiting office in Edinburgh in 2005.

The most depressing thing about all of this is that the kind of encryption technology that could have prevented a security breach from these kinds of losses is not even particularly expensive.

Anyway cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell has now announced a civil service-wide ban on removing unencrypted data from Whitehall offices, in an email to permanent secretaries in charge of all government departments. "From now on, no unencrypted laptops or drives containing personal data should be taken outside secured office premises," he said in the email. “Please ensure that this is communicated throughout your organisation and delivery bodies and implemented immediately, and that steps are taken to monitor compliance."

Still, better late than never?

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Classmate PC is Intel's low-cost mini-laptop, geared for school children. Intel confirmed that the OLPC board asked it to stop supporting non-OLPC platforms.

The chipmaker initially resisted joining OLPC, which currently distributes a $200 mini-laptop called XO that is powered by a microprocessor from Intel's chief rival Advanced Micro Devices...

Well it seems the gloves are now well and truly off, as Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC has just issued the following statement: I clip here in its entirety as it makes interesting reading.

"We at OLPC have been disappointed that Intel could not deliver on any of the promises they made when they joined OLPC; while we were hopeful for a positive, collaborative relationship, it never materialised," said Negroponte.

"Intel came in late to the process and joined an already strong and thriving OLPC Board of Directors made up of premier technology partners; these partners have been crucial in helping us fulfil our mission of getting laptops into the hands of children in the developing world. We have always embraced and welcomed other low-cost laptop providers to join us in this mission. But since joining the OLPC Board of Directors in July, Intel has violated its written agreement with OLPC several times. Intel continued to disparage the XO laptop in developing nations that had already decided to partner with OLPC (Uruguay and Peru), with countries that were in the midst of choosing a laptop solution (Brazil and Nigeria), and even small and remote places where Intel has no real interest (Mongolia)."

"Intel was unable to work cooperatively with OLPC on software development. Instead, over the entire six months it was a member of the board, Intel contributed nothing to OLPC. Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software – even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an "Intel inside" XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power – exactly the opposite direction of OLPC's vision."

"Despite OLPC's best efforts to work things out with Intel and several warnings that their behaviour was untenable, it is clear that Intel's heart has never been in working collaboratively as a part of OLPC. This is well illustrated by the way in which our separation was announced single-handedly by Intel; Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Actions do speak louder than words in this case. As we said in the past, we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market."

He even said that Intel’s departure from the board will actually benefit OLPC: "The benefit to the departure of Intel from the OLPC board is a renewed clarity in purpose and the marketplace; we will continue to focus on our mission of providing every child with an opportunity for learning."

Whatever you think about the OLPC project -- some believe what these children most need is enough food and fresh water, not a connected laptop -- it certainly courts its share of controversy for a non-profit organization.

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What will 2008 have in store for enterprise IT?

Companies will still be doing SOA, but they'll in many cases be looking to BPM as a veneer on top of their SOA to give business people more power over their own systems and to free up the IT department a little.

Everyone will come out with a 'green' IT angle, even the least efficient, most polluting equipment providers.

And finally, the platform companies that bought all the BI players will start making a lot of noise about performance management, which some might call the next phase in BI. Taking the power of BI and making it a little easier to use, and a little more tailored to the real needs of the business professional.

Whatever 2008 holds, I wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year!

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I am glad that London Underground is improving its signals. I am even glad that they utilize otherwise-lucrative billboard space in order to tell us so: after all, you have to be seen to be improving, rather than just improving.

But I am less heartened by the fact that the massive message contained not one, but two glaring grammatical errors. Firstly, it should have been “improved signals mean”, not “improved signals means”.

Also, it should have read, “mean fewer delays”, not “mean less delays”.

In fact, for any cynics who travel regularly on the tube – and let’s face it, travelling on the tube can turn the most glad-of-heart optimist into a cynic after a short while -- the corrected sentence should read: “Improved signals likely to make little difference. Only fewer people or greater capacity could result in less overcrowding.”

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Firstly, why does the Guardian see the need to publish content by the TV critic of the Mirror? Don’t get me wrong, I like his ShelleyVision columns a lot. I just find it a little odd that they are published in the Guardian. Wouldn’t that be like my own esteemed organ, CBR, publishing a column by the columnists of rival magazines? Why would I, or indeed the Guardian, want to do that?

If only Wollaston would preview the TV, instead of reviewing it, I would know exactly what to watch every night. Wollaston is hardly ever wrong as to which programmes will provide a televisual feast, and which a famine.

If there were a referendum tomorrow, I would vote for Wollaston whether the question asked was ‘who should manage the spending of the BBC license fee?’ or ‘who should run the country?’ He’s that good.

Perhaps Jim Shelley gets a regular gig at the Guardian because he used to work there (true). But whatever the reason, and whatever you think about his TV critiques compared to Wollaston’s, I implore you, dear Guardian, keeper of the faith and purveyor of excellent Quick Crosswords: at the very least stop saying that “Jim Shelley is TV critic of the Mirror.”

What on earth is wrong with “Jim Shelley is the Mirror’s TV Critic”?

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In case you missed it, we’ve posted the stories into our Business Intelligence Analysis Center, which you can find on the left of our home page.

But to make it even simpler for you to find all of the articles, I’ve created a mini contents page for you down below: now isn’t that what you call organised!

How to put your data to work

What’s in your basket? A look at BI in retail.

Brave new world: a look at enterprise search

Making the business case for BI investment

Q&A with business intelligence experts

Technology focus: the different approaches to BI

Café Nero case study: why they implemented Cognos, and what they achieved by doing so.

Power to perform: from BI to performance management

Safe & secure: lessons learned from the HM Revenue and Customs data debacle

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The report is on business intelligence, and you probably don’t need me to tell you what a hot topic that is right now. Little wonder that over $15bn worth of acquisitions have been consummated in just four deals this year: Oracle buying Hyperion, SAP buying Business Objects, Cognos buying Applix and then IBM buying Cognos.

The report looks at the latest trends in BI: the move towards performance management; the rise of enterprise search from the likes of Autonomy, FAST and Google Enterprise; the sophisticated use of BI in the retail sector and even how to justify investment in business intelligence technologies.

There’s a roundup of the latest news, and some thought-provoking factoids – for example that the term business intelligence was first used in the context in which we now use it, in an article in 1958 written by H.P.Luhn in the IBM Journal.

CBR co-produced it with those nice people at Special Report Publishing. It features comment from many of the experts in the BI field, and even takes a look at how companies can avoid a major data loss such as that experienced by Nationwide with the loss of a laptop early this year, or HMRC and its two missing computer discs.

Anyway, check it out tomorrow, and be sure to let me know what you think.

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Q. Could those two CDs become a double-album Christmas Number 1? The police don't know where they are, but maybe a DJ is spinning them in a club and getting an underground following as we speak?

Q. Who trusts the mail* with anything other than postcards these days? Putting anything of significant value in the post is like playing Russian Roulette. The recipient might get it, they might not. Take an example: the father of a flatmate of mine at university posted her a frozen rump steak, first class postage, on a Monday morning.
By his reckoning, it would still be frozen when it arrived the next day. However, when a bloody package fell through the letterbox a week later, our immediate reaction was not, "ah-ha, someone has been sent a frozen rump steak that defrosted in transit", but "ah-ha, someone has kidnapped that other flatmate we haven't seen since the weekend, and has posted us her finger as proof of identity so we will meet their ransom demands". Until we opened the package, that is.
* this point is largely irrelevant because the CDs were lost in HMRC's internal post, not by the Royal Mail, which never loses anything, anyway.

Q. The Revenue says the police say they have no reason to believe the CDs have fallen into criminal hands. But since no one has any idea where they could be, might they not just as well say, "The police tell us they have no reason to believe the CDs have not fallen into criminal hands"?

Q. If you were going to send 25 million names and addresses in the post, wouldn't you at least send it recorded delivery, where the postie asks for a signature when it is delivered? If they had done that, at least the police could say with full confidence that although they are still lost, they were at least signed for by a Mr. Data Hacker, of Number 3, No Known Address Street, Somewhere on Thames, Cyberspace.

Q. Could the HM Revenue & Customs go into PR? PR companies spend a fortune getting press releases seen by as many people as possible. The Revenue could simply put press releases on 2 CDs, and put them in the post.

Q. Is 2 lost CDs better than one? If both are found by a criminal, that's very bad. But no worse than if that criminal found all that data on 1 CD. On 2 CDs, they may become separated in the post, and only one of them might be found by a criminal, the other handed in to the police. If all was on one CD, it would either go to a criminal or not. So, which is statistically better, 2 lost CDs or 1? For that matter, if a criminal boards a train at 8.45am with 2 CDs and gets off after 3 stops, but they can only get off at stops with names that end in an 'n', like Staunton, or Southampton, are they more or less likely to be wearing a beard by 3.45pm the next day?

Q. Does anyone know of a company called Mr.DataHacker & Sons? I just noticed a debit from my account by that firm, but can't for the life of me remember buying anything from them...