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Photographed from the roof deck of 440 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn (Schaefer Landing North).

I have writtten about JackBe several times over the past few years and watched their evolution from a mashup provider to using their technology to support a new wave of business intelligence (see for example, JackBe’s Presto provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User). What originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time business intelligence platform that connects directly to live data sources and delivers information through Enterprise Apps and Dashboards as needed by business users. I recently spoke with Chris Warner, VP of Marketing and John Crupi, their CTO, about their latest release of Presto which focused on smartphone and tablet users.

Chris talked about the rise of mobile in general and with business intelligence in particular. One analyst puts the current use of mobile for business intelligence at 8% of total use. Gartner now claims that by 2014 a third of business intelligence will be accessed through mobile devices. If they are including tablets in with mobile I can see this happening.  Chris said that this increased use can take two forms. It can be a new channel for current users and an opportunity to reach new users with new apps. He hopes that the latter occurs, as it is a great opportunity.

Chris gave me an example. A data center operation manager, who supports several centers and is constantly on the go, needs to be able to monitor what is happening at these centers without having to log into a desktop or even lap top computer. They need a mobile tablet to get alerts, check on performance levels and respond to calls for support. They need a mobile operations dashboard. There are many people who do have operational responsibilities who fall into this category of need.

GE Aviation is one of JackBe’s  clients using Presto for data center monitoring. GE Aviation has been working with Presto over the past year and half and has been very successful. They attribute some of this success to being able to develop Apps at a much more rapid rate than with previous technology solutions. For example, “A request came in from senior management asking for an additional App to be developed after the majority of the solution was implemented, ‘the project sponsor was able to send a last minute requirement to their developer and the was App built and deployed in less than 24 hours’ Normally, this would have taken them several weeks due to all the politics and policies GE has in place for their BI environment.

Chris predicts that operational dashboards, in general, will be one of the killer business apps for tablet. Other examples include agencies within the US Dept of Defense that use Presto for situational awareness, Smartronix uses it for budget performance management within its government clients, and Qualcomm looks at real-time program management KPIs. This all makes sense to me. Here is a sample dashboard on an iPad.

Chris went on to say that business intelligence is under going a renaissance and taking new forms. I would agree and it is the new forms that are driving the resurgence. First there is big data as the volume of content expands. Part of this growth is driven by user-generated content through social media. There is also an increase in the quality of analytics and focus on predictive measures.

Looking at social media there is some structure present through metadata. For example, Twitter has hash tags and location. You can look at volumes and tagging to see where spikes occur around topics. This and other sources now allow for real-time intelligence so business users can get information while it is still relevant to their decisions.

So support this new wave of business intelligence software needs new capabilities. Chris outlined three components of these requirements. First there are live connections, second, self-service assembly, and third pervasive apps. You need to get information immediately from multiple sources. Users are increasingly expecting self-service in all that they do and finally, you need to be able to publish and use apps anywhere. This latter requirement is where mobile comes in.

Chris and John showed me some components of Presto that address these issues. One of the features that I especially liked is the ability to preview what an app looks like in desktop mode, smart phone portrait and landscape views and tablet portrait and landscape views. You can see a close up of screen that shows these options below.

Here is sample screen optimized for a smart phone in the landscape view.

Creating apps is done through visual mapping and making selections from drop downs. Below is you can see an app being developed. I really like their ease of development and ease of use.

Mobile users are starting out expecting self–service. Most of them go out and get their own devices and do not wait for their firm to supply them. These same people are not going to want to wait for IT to set up their business intelligence apps. I think that Jackbe is making some wise moves to not only go into mobile in a significant way, but also to enable self-service for users as part of this offering.

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As more and more blog posts are starting to come along sharing further insights on some of the major highlights from the recent IBM Lotusphere and IBM Connect 2012 events held last week in Orlando, Florida, I guess it’s now time for me to start sharing my two cents on what both events were like, what I learned, what I thought were some pretty interesting developments and happenings, as well as a bunch of other tidbits that I think would prove useful to share over here in this blog. So over the course of the next few days, perhaps couple of weeks, and in between other blog entries here and there, I will be sharing plenty of those highlights pointing folks out to individual keynote and speaker sessions that I enjoyed quite a bit attending and learning from, but this time around with a slight difference. Not going to give entire details for each of them, since for the first time ever that I can remember, and over the course of the next few days, we are going to start seeing how recordings of live streamed sessions, as well as presentations for each of them will be shared out there publicly for everyone to enjoy, if not already. So, instead of sounding a bit too repetitive, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts and personal opinions about what I gathered from each of the sessions I attended, as well as the overall events themselves. Ready? Let’s go!

I couldn’t start this series of blog posts without mentioning something that I have talked about in the past, while trying to redefine my own Social Web experience, and which from there onwards it’s now pretty much shaped how I view things with regards to technology, connectivity, and all things social, whether attending conference events live or not. I guess, at this point in time, if you have been reading this blog for a while now, you will see where I am heading, but, to be honest, I couldn’t kick-off this series of entries without commenting what, to me, has been one of the major highlights from the overall conference events from last week: once again, and for the zillionth time, the conference wi-fi connectivity throughout the entire week failed big time. Appalling. A mega fail, actually, if I may add!

So, why am I saying that incident was one of the most powerful and empowering highlights from the overall event? Am I crazy? No. Not really. At least, not anymore. If you folks remember, there used to be a time when I tended to get really upset whenever I would be attending technical conference events and the wi-fi connectivity would not be working accordingly to meet up the expectations we all had. Not that I would want to constantly be connected to the Social Web for my own purposes, but, essentially, because for the vast majority of the occasions I always was very keen on sharing along, through live tweeting, further insights and additional thoughts that those of us, who were privileged enough to be there in person, could share with those who didn’t have that opportunity.

Over time one comes to the conclusion that in today’s world it’s almost impossible to host and organise a technical conference without taking for granted that the wi-fi connection will fail. Even for IBM itself. I am saying almost, because there are a couple of exceptions where really relevant events have managed to make it happen consistently over the course of time without failure and the experiences have been phenomenal, for both folks attending the event live and those watching from the distance. Yet, for the vast majority, they haven’t been able to make it consistently. And, once again, IBM has fallen into that trap as well, once more.

Why am I saying “once again”? Well, because, if you folks would remember, last year the connectivity throughout the entire week of Lotusphere was just absolutely brilliant! Yes, there were a couple of hiccups here and there, but overall it was just fantastic! So energising and refreshing seeing how your own employer can get it right with regards to providing a beautiful experience to help connect the dots, those physical and virtual ones, that I guess I was expecting too much this year. You know, if you set up the standard that you know how to make wi-fi work at large conferences, and you succeed big time!, the least I am going to expect is that in following, sub-sequent years you would be able to keep up with that expectation and meet, once again, that standard. No rocket science, right?

Thus what happened this year then? Not sure about all of the details, and I doubt I would ever get to find out more about them, but I can tell you what happened. None of my iOS devices managed to get connected throughout the entire week. None of them! And that means that, for the vast majority of the event, I was in the dark. Frustrated and irritated? Upset and extremely disappointed? Furious that, once again, we have gone back to square one? No, I wasn’t. You know, when life gives you lemons, the best thing you can do is do some lemonade! And that’s just exactly what I did. And, boy, I had a blast the entire week making it one of the best conference events I have attended in a long long while! What happened then, right?, you may be wondering …

Well, this is what happened… I no longer get stressed about that lack of connectivity, nor upset, irritated, frustrated, disappointed, gutted, and whatever else that, once again, the whole world would be missing out seeing Lotusphere, or whatever the event, through my eyes. Yes, a few weeks back, while on holidays, I decided it was no longer worth it stressing about it, losing focus from the real thing, that is, attending the event live!, and perhaps be that loud mouth that no-one wants to keep hearing telling the same thing over and over again. That’s why now I only give it about 15 minutes at the beginning of the event to try to get connected to the Social Web. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, right away I lose the motivation to keep trying and I move on, never coming back. I am done with the negativity and the subsequent frustration that typically comes out as a result of not being connected. Time to move on then …

And that’s why, while I experienced the same disappointing behaviour of not having a working wi-fi connection while at Lotusphere, I remembered this absolutely brilliant article by Mary K. Pratt, over at CIO.com, under the suggestive title “How to Get the Most Out of IT Conferences” where she shares plenty of amazingly good insights on how to get the most out of technical events without having to rely on being connected to the Web. What a great idea! Taking conferences back into the time where we were all involved with a completely different game altogether. Meeting people face to face, and engage on what, as of late, has become one of my favourite activities when I attend live events: physical social networking. It cannot get any better than that! In that article, Mary gets to share hints and tips from various different angles, which I thought would be worth while sharing over here, so that you could see how that game can change for the better, without the hassle, nor the frustrations:

• Know Your Purpose
• Do Your Homework in Advance
• Learn to Network, The Right Way
• Put Yourself Out There
• Create Your Own Opportunities
• Recap and Reach Out
• Have a Post-Game Plan

Of special interest for folks out there would be the sections “Learn to Network, The Right Way“, as well as “Put Yourself Out There”. Specially, with golden nuggets like this quote:

“But networking isn’t about how many business cards you can hand out and collect. Rather, it’s about  building relationships and finding ways to help others. [...] “Networking is the art of building and maintaining connections for shared positive outcomes“

Or this other one:

“It’s tempting to spend downtime fiddling with your iPhone, but checking email or downloading an app won’t advance your career. So put away your smartphones and laptops and find ways to be more engaged in the event“

And that’s exactly what I did! I put down my iPhone and my iPad and started embarking on some pretty massive offline social networking talking and conversing with as many people as I could possibly find and bump into. Whether they were folks I knew from the past, or just recently met, or just got introduced to them, I basically pretty much didn’t stop networking throughout the entire week! And that was just absolutely delightful!! Even if I didn’t have enough physical hours to meet up with all of the folks I wanted to talk to and catch up with!!

That’s when it came to me the realisation that perhaps we need to look with fresh new eyes into how we participate at live conference events. Take for a fact that the wi-fi connection will fail, what’s next? Well, to me, from now onwards it’s going to remain pretty much exactly like I did during the course of last week: network, network, network!

Knowing that there would always be replays for some of keynote and breakout sessions through the live streamed recordings, knowing as well how the vast majority of the presentations would be made publicly available has certainly helped a lot as well in another aspect that I wasn’t really aware till I faced it myself. How many times have you been engaged on an amazing conversation with other fellow attendees, to then realise you need to dash off quickly into the next breakout session. Then the heat of the moment is gone, and the conversation dies right there?!? Far too many times, don’t you think? Well, I missed a bunch of sessions just because of that! I made a conscious choice that I rather prefer to have the human contact, that human touch of the conversation, that sparks that inspiring moment you know you can bump into while meeting other people and be wowed big time than rushing off from one session to another. And it was the perfect choice!

Because over the course of the entire week I have been involved in quite a few amazingly deep conversations on the topics of Social, Adoption, Enablement, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Learning, you name it, and right now my head is spinning with plenty of ideas that I would want to share over here across with you folks, as reflections, in multiple upcoming blog entries. I guess that’s probably the main point of “Recap and Reach Out“, that Mary mentioned in her article, while jotting down these thoughts over here in this blog, which, in a way, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, don’t you think?

Perhaps that’s my own way to contribute, from here onwards, into the Social Web after attending all of these conference events and see that, since we are not going to be connected, we may as well do something much more productive: stay focused, learn, engage, converse, practice and truly live offline social networking! The Social Web is always going to be there. You might not have another chance of meeting those people, face to face, you are learning from a great deal any time soon! So you may as well take the chance and dive right in!

And that’s exactly what I did! As frustrating and irritating as not having good, reliable connectivity last week at Lotusphere was (By spending those 15 minutes to get connected initially) like I said above, this year, the event has been one of the very best yet to attend and learn plenty more about all things Social, as well as the Social Enterprise.

The most rewarding bit from the overall event was the huge amount of conversations I had with plenty of customers, and business partners, who were very keen on sharing their success stories, their experiences with adoption, their journey to become fully socially integrated enterprises and their passion for helping drive, redesign and redefine the future of the workplace for the corporate world of the 21st century. Not just for their businesses, but also for their own customers’!!  In short, to me, Lotusphere and IBM Connect this year have demonstrated clearly how the conversation has moved from the trying to justify the WHY and the WHAT (Yes, the sempiternal set of inhibitors, showstoppers and ROI related questions) into the more socially transformational the HOW. Biggest key takeaway for me so far has been having learned from them all so much in over the course of one week than the last six months of trying to catch up with the Social Web. Yes, indeed, and I should be grateful to the lack of connectivity to be able to do that, because, from now onwards, I will be coming back for more!

Now, I just need to ensure I do justice to all of those folks I talked with and learned from, as they are about to be featured on upcoming blog posts, from yours truly, where I will be sharing their story, which I guess is just probably as good as it gets… Applying storytelling and narrative to business, and, in particular, solving business problems through the lens of Social. Who would have thought about that, right? As interconnected and networked as we are, we are back to basics: sharing and learning plenty more from one another and from our own stories that we keep telling while meeting up face to face, something that even the Social Web would never be capable of replacing. And perhaps it shouldn’t. It makes us all much more approachable, closer, engaged, in short, humane and that is a good thing!

Thank you much, Lotusphere and IBM Connect, for enabling and facilitating a new, refreshing view for yours truly on how to get the most out of technical conferences from now onwards …

Ohhh, by the way, seeing Ok Go! play live in front of an engaged and riveted audience of several thousand geeks blasting out quite an amazing tunes and positive, energetic vibes surely was one of the major highlights as well!

As regular readers know, I have a deep affection for Carnegie Mellon University, where I did my graduate work. I’m happy to announce that two of my colleagues (both fellow CMU PhDs) will be giving talks at CMU in a couple of weeks, and I hope that some of you will have the opportunities to attend.

On Tuesday, February 7th, Abhimanyu Lad will be hosting an information session at 6pm in Scaife Hall, Room 214. Abhi is rock star on our data science team, and he’s been working on the next generation of LinkedIn search. You can get a taste of his work from his recent HCIR 2011 presentation, “Is it Time to Abandon Abandonment?“. Abhi will talk about a variety of technical challenges that data scientists and engineers are working on at LinkedIn.

On Thursday, February 9th, Paul Ogilvie will talk about “Where Big Data Meets Real-Time: Efficiently Indexing and Ranking News using Activity” at 3:30pm in GHC 6115. Paul is responsible for article relevance infrastructure and algorithms on LinkedIn Today, a great example of social navigation – not to mention a great success for users. Paul will talk about the technical details that make LinkedIn Today possible, including a novel use of inverted lists to efficiently index and support real-time updates to document representations.

And, even if you can’t make it to the talks, I encourage you to visit the LinkedIn booth at the EOC fair on Wednesday, February 8th. We’re looking for great software engineers and data scientists, and we’re especially interested in interns.

Photographed from the fourth floor of 725 Fifth Avenue (Trump Tower).

• Atlassian, USA
• Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), France
• Basler Versicherungen, Schweiz
• Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH (BRZ GmbH), Austria
• Editora Meio & Mensagem Ltda., Brazil
• FOXTEL Channels Group, Australia
• Leroy Merlin España S.L.U., Spain
• Lufthansa Systems Network Services GmbH, Germany
• MBC, Middle East (Dubai)
• Michelin Brazil, Brazil
• Scientific Learning, USA
• Sheffield City Council, UK
• Zumba Fitness, USA

• Cross Agency
• Fast Forward
• Priocept
• Serviceplan
• T8y
• Tribal DDB
• Ventiv
• VML

Geoff Bock provides a useful look at what firms need to do to make their Web sites relevant to today’s Web users with is article, Beyond the Web page: Broader Web strategy a must for business success. He sees 2011 at the end of Page-oriented Web sites. Geoff notes, “enterprises can no longer afford to maintain their digital presences simply as collections of Web pages designed for full-screen browsing.” This is because “we now expect a level of interactivity and immediacy in our digital experience that far outstrips the capabilities of the page-oriented Web to deliver.”

So what needs to be done? Geoff suggests that we start with the customer experience and work out from there. This is always a wise move. Start with business use cases and not the tools. One way to do this is to get more granular with your content segmentation. Geoff suggests offers some examples: a “news article,” a “music album,” a “marketing plan” and an “instructional video.” These provide a more business oriented approach and set the stage for the required metadata. For example, a news article is a text file and has such fields as “headline,” “byline,” “body,” “image” and “subject keyword.” A music album is an audio file and has such fields as “title,” “artist” and “genre.”

This makes a lot of sense and opens up many possibilities including common elements across content types such as byline for a new article and artist for a music album. Getting the right level of granularity for metadata is one key element for a successful content strategy. You need to make content accessible and targeted for search engines and people. You also need to set content for the semantic Web by making it understandable to machines. Geoff sets some of the conditions for making the Semantic web work.

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  http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/16463235807/the-collaboration-matrix-what-dynamic-structures-do

This entry was cross-posted from Meanders: The Dow Brook Blog.

Software analysts and buyers have historically favored platforms over application suites and stand-alone applications. Why? Because platforms offer both a rich set of pre-integrated functionality and the ability to add or build new features and applications, some of which may be extensively customized for an organization.

IBM has long been considered a platform provider of enterprise software, particularly in the infrastructure and middleware categories. More recently, IBM has evolved from being a vendor of a collaboration suite (Quickr) to a provider of multiple integrated, extensible offerings for enterprise collaboration, social networking, messaging, content sharing and management, and customer- and employee-facing web experience management. IBM’s vision for for this confederation of offerings, codenamed ‘Project Vulcan’, was first articulated at Lotusphere 2010. Last year’s Lotusphere presented initial, limited evidence that the vision was becoming reality.

Lotusphere 2012, held last week, showcased IBM’s latest efforts at unifying its interaction platform. IBM previewed the upcoming releases of its Connections, Notes/Domino, and Customer and Intranet Web Experience offerings. As one would expect from a platform software provider, each of these products works with the others out of the box. However, IBM, has gone beyond merely providing integration between the separate offerings by embedding functionality from each into the others. For example, IBM customers who have licensed both Connections and Notes will soon be able to send and receive email from within Connections, and, conversely, consumers will be able to view and interact with the Connections activity stream from within Notes.

The increasing power of the IBM interaction platform was further underscored by demonstrations of related, integrated and embedded functional services from its Quickr collaboration, Content Manager and FileNet enterprise content management, and Cognos analytics offerings. This extended scope of the Project Vulcan vision is what sets IBM apart from other platform software vendors, and it was good to see IBM articulating and demonstrating that differentiation at Lotusphere.

Death of a Tradeoff

We, as an industry, have assumed the existence of a tradeoff between rich functionality and simple, intuitive user experiences. Conventional wisdom says that as more features are added, the resulting complexity degrades the user experience, forcing software architects and designers to find an optimal balance between functionality and usability. The tradeoff has traditionally been managed in one of two ways: 1) by creating simple, single-purpose applications that are not overloaded with functionality, or 2) by partitioning functionality into multiple, related applications in a suite. Platforms have largely not attempted to manage this tradeoff at all for developers/designers, administrators, or consumers. Not only is the platform’s complexity on full display; it is generally promoted as a benefit.

IBM’s implementation of its Project Vulcan vision has, for perhaps the first time, obviated the long-held tradeoff between functionality and ease-of-use at the platform level. The versions of Connections, Notes/Domino, and the Web Experience offerings that where announced and demonstrated at Lotusphere 2012 (and will be released over the course of this year) are both feature-rich and highly usable. Each offering has had its user interface redesigned, yielding a cleaner look that is more consistent across the interaction platform. Additionally, the new user interface designs are simpler than their predecessors and, in effect, minimize the complexity created by IBM’s extended integration and embedding of functionality from related software offerings.

This harmonious co-existence of broad, advanced functionality and a consumer-friendly computing experience is what makes IBM’s interaction platform really different and powerful. The first public glimpse of this next-generation enterprise software came during the Lotusphere 2012 Opening General Session, when Connections Next was demonstrated by its Lead Project Manager, Suzanne Livingston. My reaction, a tweet that was later displayed before the beginning of the Closing General Session, sums up the impact of IBM’s work on its interaction platform over the last year:

Dow Brook’s Point-Of-View

While there is more work to be done, IBM should be proud of the next-generation interaction platform it is bringing to market. Lotusphere 2012 demonstrated that IBM is in good position to be a provider of choice for social business software. The work that they’ve done over the last year strongly differentiates their interaction platform and should positively affect its adoption by customers. IBM’s refusal to acknowledge the old, limiting tradeoff between platform complexity and user experience should accelerate the consolidation of the Enterprise Social Software market in the second half of 2012. It may also more firmly establish IBM as a leader in the Web Experience software category and spark renewed interest in its Notes/Domino messaging and Sametime unified communications offerings.

Disclosure: IBM is a client of Dow Brook’s Insight OnDemand subscription advisory service and paid the author’s registration and hotel expenses related to Lotusphere 2012 attendance.

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Photographed by David Mitzman from the main deck of the Norwegian Gem Cruise Ship.

Mark Fidelman wrote a very spot on article recently, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I will not repeat it here and suggest you go to his original. However, I do want to add my own perspective that is driven by both industry observations and personal experience with both companies. Apple created one of the more memorable Super Bowl Ads in 1984.  It portrays IBM as Big Brother controlling the mindless masses and Apple coming to the rescue.

Mark writes that this ad “does not represent today’s IBM – or Apple for that matter.” I would add that the roles are now completely reversed.  As Mark notes, IBM is successfully fostering an open culture within its 400,000 employees and the 8 million participants in the IBM developer network. IBM is looking at new ways to better understand the conversations that are occurring within these groups and to continuously support transparency (see Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour).

I have also heard from a trusted source that with Apple’s policy a developer who works on Apple iOS is not allowed to work on another mobile operating system unless certain conditions are met. So many companies have to maintain separate development units for such systems as Apple iOS and Andriod. Apple has consistently supported closed systems and IBM has supported open systems for quite some time.

I did work for both Apple and IBM in the 1980s as a service provider. This was the white shirt and tie IBM and the jeans and sneakers Apple. However, the IBMers, were, as they are now, very friendly, open, and seemed to lead balanced work lives. There was an openness to new ideas and a wide range of personal interests. I had less exposure to the Apple people but they seemed to work very long seven-day weeks and their job was their life. I grant this is just an impression and I could be wrong.

Now I remain a fan of many of Apple’s products. I find the employees in their stores to be very helpful and they seem to be empowered to go the extra mile for customers.  As a disclosure, I am writing this on a Mac, own an iPhone and an iPod. I use iTunes all the time. I hope they do not take them away from me for writing this. IBM has also allowed me to attend Lotusphere for the past two years so I have a better understanding of what IBM is doing. Here is a summary of my notes from the 2011 Lotusphere and here is a summary of my notes from the 2012 Lotusphere.

But what will happen to Apple now with Steve Jobs gone? My advice to Apple it to reinvent itself as IBM did and develop an open culture and an open product strategy.

Mark titled his article, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I would add Apple to the list of companies that need to be more like IBM. 

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