« February 20, 2003 | Main | February 24, 2003 »
February 21, 2003
Being Smart About Business Intelligence
Many companies have achieved considerable success in using BI (business intelligence) tools. Wal-Mart, General Electric, and Cisco have all expended huge sums on BI solutions, and give these systems a great deal of credit in helping them successfully manage their business. Siebel Systems, by virtue of tight controls on processes and doing things right from the start, has also created an internal BI system that is a model for what many companies are trying to do.
[Full story at InfoWorld.com...]
I've started to write an occasional article for InfoWorld. I'm excited to be able to write about enterprise computing issues and the chance to see some interesting, new things. Jon Udell turned me on to this opportunity and I'm grateful. The figure at the right is a representation of the hierarchy of IT needs I mention in the article. This is similar to the concept I layed out in the Road to the Future document I prepared for the IT Commission last November. I intend to do a longer white paper on this hierarchy soon because I think its a useful high-level roadmap for guiding IT investment.
06:21 PM | Recommend This | Print This
InfoPath (or XDocs)
In this InfoWorld article, Jon Udell gives the 10 things you should know about InfoPath (ne'e XDocs). There are a couple of points I thought deserved emphasis:
- The product includes a full-blown DOM, not just a SAX API which means that you should be able to manipulate the XML, not just read it, from an outside program.
- There's a visual XSLT tool. As Jon points out, XSLT is powerful, but difficult to use (unless you're a Prolog programmer---then its old hat).
- InfoPath can generate a schema from an XML snippet. You may not want to use this generated schema as your final version, but its a useful way to quickly get something that's pretty good and then refine it later.
Jon claims that this is a pradigm shift and I agree. Having a tool that stores unstructured data in a semi-structured, common format and is likely to be widely used because of the links to the new Office suite is a powerful combination. Moving the vast quantities of unstructured data to an easily accessible semi-structured format will bring huge changes to the enterprise. One example is the ease with which you can replace what is now a custom application. There are companies waiting to be born to take advantage of this change.