The Changing Landscape: Enterprise

I've been busy over the last few weeks developing a series of events in partnership with the Software and Information Industry Association (www.siia.net) that will take a look at the transformations occurring right now in three critical areas. Each of these areas (enterprise, mobile and security) are wrestling with dramatic change that is raising technology, regulatory, and cultural issues while generating tremendous business opportunities and creating real value for customers. Each of these events will feature insight from panelists with differing perspectives on all of these issues as well as peek into what the future might look like given today’s trends.

The first panel discussion (scheduled for next Tuesday morning) will cover the issues and trends in the changing landscape of enterprise software. Such issues include SaaS, outsourcing, integration complexity, Oracle's acquisition spree, Google's new SaaS app package, etc. A special focus will also be on the impact of change among government enterprises.

If you are going to be around the DC area, please click on the link below and register!

The SIIA Changing Landscape Series: Enterprise

Panelists: Tony DeSomma, Vice President, Oracle Public Sector Practice, BearingPoint
Tom Mazur, VP Government Sales, Lagan
Gary Golding, Edison Venture Fund
Moderator: Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group
Date: July 31, 2007
Time: 8am to 10am
Location: SIIA DC office, 1090 Vermont Avenue, 6^th Floor, Washington DC
Attendees: 50 people
Registration Fee: SIIA members $20/non-members $40

Please register here: http://www.siia.net/events/prereg.asp?eventid=756

Enterprise Amnesia? Jeff Jones wrote about an interesting concept about the short comings of today's model of the enterprise back in June. The title of this post was "Why Faster Systems Can Make Organizations Dumber Faster."Apparently, despite all the many, many software and hardware products designed to make enterprises smarter, there is a gap between what a company knows and what it can act on.

As Jeff says,

"This problem – an inability to locate and act upon what one knows – is getting worse because faster systems are producing information substantially faster than traditional sensemaking algorithms (using these same fast systems) can keep up."

He futher explains what will be needed to close the gap,

"And, if you have been following my blog, this will come as no surprise. Enterprise intelligence is going to have everything to do with such things as semantic reconciliation, persistent context, discoverability, perpetual analytics and incremental learning. All in real time, of course."

Compare this forward thinking problem solving with the news out last Friday in Government Executive:

"Pentagon Still Burdened With Multiple Back-Office Systems"

Right out of the Tofflers' book "Revolutionary Wealth": the speed gap between society and government is going to be a drag on the development of both.

Facebook vs. LinkedIn?

It's amazing how much press, blog posts and chatter Facebook has generated over the last few months. I remember reading an article about Facebook a couple of years ago, but the site seemed like a myspace knock off. It always goes to show the value of clean, usable web design and a well thought out business plan.

But now Facebook has leaped out of the tweeny and college crowd and into the business world. Most business contacts I have use LinkedIn, as I do. Back in May, both Robert Scoble and ValleyWag have sniffed out a coming battle between Facebook and LinkedIn over business networking.

For my money, however, since both companies have opened up their networks to third party API's, it makes waaaay more sense to connect then that way, rather than one company buy the other. Of course, Google and a $5B check might make "the best thing to do" irrelevant.

The Three Little Blogs: A Cautionary Tale is a great post by Michele Cepeda at bloggrrl.com. I highly recommend it if you are getting into blogging, as I am. I always like my constructive criticism to come in the form of humor.

Which blog am I? Jeez, I'm not even off Blogspot yet! And I'm still building up to a two-times a week post pace...

I hope you all had a wonderful July Fourth week last week. I spent the big day at the Washington Nationals game. The Nats won 6-0 over the Cubs. As a childhood White Sox fan, and now Nats fan, this result made me very, very happy.


Another thing that has been making me happy recently is the explosion of interest in Facebook. It's been increasingly clear that MySpace just isn't going to the networking platform of the future. Too much spam for one thing. Facebook has its limitations too, but now that they have opened their platform to outside developers and VC money is flowing to find small app ideas, I foresee a lot of these limitations being addressed.

In the end, though, someone needs to combine all these different networking platforms into one meta, uber service. I'd like to get my Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn networks to work with each other which preserving the "separateness" of each part of life and each group of contacts.

Here is an interesting article in Time written by a 35+ old like me who has mixed feelings about social media and networking sites.