Myths and Misconceptions of Technology

A recent survey from consultants Logica and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) reveals that about one in three projects to improve business processes fails. The expenses of businesses have run at a hefty $10bn.

The findings also show that winners tend to be more ambitious in their planning and to run cross-regional and cross-departmental projects as opposed to their less successful counterparts. They also show a more proactive approach towards possible problems and involve customers and partners in their planning.

The survey was conducted among 380 managers from nine European countries.

As we all know, most of the household concepts in IT are very much talked about and very little understood and the marketing hacks seize the opportunity to promise everything to everybody and the big players are poaching for innovation among specialized vendors, mostly in a rush to fill their game pockets faster than the competition before actually asserting the benefits of the acquisition for themselves or their customers.

In today’s enterprise there is a lot of messy data, duplicate or plain wrong information scattered around in ERPs, custom applications and user-generated spreadsheets across all departments. The resulting silo effect is worsened by quick changes across the board and even timely and accurate information soon becomes a rare luxury item. Worse still, most BI tools are far from intelligent in the sense of smart like this article (in German) of revised profit expectations of ERP (and BI) vendor SAP illustrates.

What is the problem?

The problem of most current BI tools is that they are limited to aggregate data in a warehouse-like manner without being able to show proper connections and run current analytics because of limited metrics. The result is usually incomplete information that is delivered too late and therefore provides no reliable input for real-time decision-making.

BI: Downward Bound

For its tenth anniversary Google has brought up its oldest index dating back to 2001. Check it out how the internet could be searched back then.

As you may probably know from my previous writing I unveil very little, especially when there is nothing to unveil. As with many other hypes, Cloud Computing can be everything to everybody as long as it promises sales opportunities and increasing profit margins. But still to this day there are people making serious attempts to navigate their way through the seemingly endless buzz clouds that evaporate from heated marketing departments.

Marketing Hype Beyond Stupidity

At least, that’s the way Richard Stallman sees it. In a recent interview the founder of the Free Software Foundation continues to say among other things:

Somebody is saying this is inevitable ? and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.

It seems obvious that Stallman then goes on to warn of proprietary systems but it’s just as obvious that any proprietary vendor rebuffs his opinion as biased. Ha! With the sole exception of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison that is, who was cited as vigorously opposing the notion of Cloud Computing as such, but nevertheless insisting that he would accept it anyway as long as he can sell it. But even this rare bluntness has seen him falling from other people’s grace who dismiss it as Oracle’s failure to deliver the “real thing” and maintaining the cloud is the future of IT. The future of IT, my god, how many similar claims have we heard already! And aren’t we currently in the umpteenth of these futures that haven’t materialized?

Small wonder that with all the attention on another would-be next big thing, Microsoft has come up with their version of the cloud. And may I say so, we are all lucky this happens because it indicates that the heat might go down again pretty soon, at least for a short while. Maybe.

Here is some news about the most recent step in Google’s bid to diversify its business model. Apart from the casual snubs in the article, CMS Watch also provides the following excerpt from their in-depth report:

Even Google’s marketing won’t go so far as to call their implementation “enterprise-class security,” instead favoring to highlight single sign-on (which the Appliance supports quite well). Document-level security is handled late-binding - the result sets are filtered for hits a searcher is allowed to see, which requires the system to fire off separate requests for each hit to see if it may be displayed. This has only one advantage - the authorization will be up-to-date to the second - but, certainly in Google’s implementation, several drawbacks.

More insights can also be found in this knowledgeable comment.

These are two much-used and often abused terms in IT. Moreover, they are frequently used as synomymous and randomly interchanged which helps little to come to grips with all the smart marketing gibberish that accompanies most IT-related matters. But as Carl Mitcham points out in Thinking through Technology efficiency in technological terms relates to a ratio of input/output, whereas effectiveness has to do with the desired outcome. This means that efficiency is strictly measurable and can be best applied to assembly-line and similar straightforward operations. Effectiveness, on the other hand, can also be measured by given parameters but as we deal with desirable results it is highly probable that we choose desired and known parameters which tell little to nothing about the unknowns of a certain action nor its immediate or long-term undesired effects. Therefore any claim of the effectiveness of IT should be taken with a grain of salt.

carl mitcham