
Some Non-Predictions for 2015
It’s that time of new year when you get deluged with analysts / bloggers predictions and prognostications. I join in most years, and of course there’s the IDC predictions process to contend with as well. This year I swore that I was skipping it. I’ve already done the new IDC “Futurescape” document and webcast with my […]

Transforming Data into Action – Part 3
In part three of the series we will focus on sources of data beyond in-house transaction data and data collected from social listening, and the impact of the Internet and Cloud Computing on both the distribution of data and the business models that are evolving around that data. Data brokers, that is, companies that aggregate […]

Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]

It’s the Real (Internet of) Things- Software is Drinking The World.
I recently had a jam-packed week in San Francisco, attending Dreamforce and running IOT at Scale. For the one or two of you that weren’t actually at Dreamforce, it’s kind of hard to sum up a conference with so much stuff going on. With that in mind it’s probably best not to try. I will […]

Transforming Data Into Action – Part One
Everywhere you look in tech today you’ll read / hear about big data and all the many uses businesses could get from it. Businesses do certainly need to become more data driven and in fact the business model for the Information Age is something we’ve referred to as “sense and respond”. Moving from the old […]

Infor, A Company in Transition
I just returned from New Orleans last evening after attending Infor’s user conference Inforum (disclosure: Infor paid my travel expenses to the event, and is an IDC client). On the flight back I was thinking about what I saw, and what I’ve learned about Infor from my last several interactions with them, and wanted to […]

Moving Beyond Application Silos
One of the challenges that many companies are facing today is dealing with the concept of creating a collaborative work environment while dealing with organizational structures that are very silo’ed. It’s more than organization structure though, many enterprise applications also operate as silos. Data then, ends up scattered across a company and “trapped” in these […]

Data Brokers and Data as a Service
As a marketer we live in a time of near infinite potential for the collection and use of prospect and customer data to drive desired outcomes and also a time of infinite confusion over all the new tools, processes and concepts. As an individual we are in an increasingly connected online world that threatens to […]

Making Better Business Decisions Part 3
In part one and two of this series I spent a fair bit of time discussing the drivers for building a sense and respond, data driven business. The concept, I think, is pretty obvious when you put it into the…

Making Better Business Decisions Part 1
Most companies have a number of enterprise systems, whether that’s financial, human resources, payroll, warehouse management, customer service or any number of other transaction based software products. The point of those systems is to provide a way to automate and create repeatable process around the business workflows and execute transactions. For Industrial Age businesses creating […]