02 Efficiency, Revisited 03 BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode 06 ‘The Most Argentine Woman’ 10 Stuart Madnick on Unlocking Scientific Data 14 IT Steps Out 19 Green Land 27 Trends to Watch in ’09 32 Reengineering Revisited 39 The Inforati Files inside Number 4, 2008 Green Land U.S. cities and states pursue innovative environmental initiatives Sheida Sahandy (left) and Chelo Picardal are helping drive green initiatives in Bellevue, Washington.
Transcript
02 Efficiency, Revisited
03 BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode
06 ‘The Most Argentine Woman’
10 Stuart Madnick on Unlocking Scientific Data
14 IT Steps Out 19 Green Land27 Trends to
Watch in ’0932 Reengineering
Revisited39 The Inforati Files
inside
Number 4, 2008
GreenLand
U.S. cities and states pursueinnovative environmental initiatives
Sheida Sahandy (left) and Chelo Picardal are helping drive green initiatives in Bellevue, Washington.
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greetings
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Efficiency, Revisited We covered a variety of topics in ON this year: business process management, cloud computing, information governance, Green IT, Web and Enterprise 2.0, Customer Communications Management, the energy crunch. One theme, I believe, ties them all together: information efficiency.
It’s an age-old quest. In the early decades of the 20th cen-tury, there was a movement in the U.S. to eliminate waste and inefficiency in businesses, government agencies, and society. A lot of attention was given to reducing waste in our use of natural resources. New research centers—and affili-ated schools—were created to find out the best way to orga-nize business activities, provide healthcare, and protect the environment.
A century later, with a syn-chronized downturn affecting
most of the world, the search is on for innovative ways to elimi-nate waste in the global infor-mation economy. How are we going to leverage information produced by business pro-cesses to reduce environmental impact? Are there more effi-cient ways to deploy IT? What changes do we need to make in how we govern the use, distri-bution, and analysis of informa-tion?
The world is bursting with information. It needs to be harnessed and put to good use, with minimum waste. I believe that with the right private- and public-sector investments during the downturn, we could come out of it with a zero-waste information economy.
BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode
The automation and real-time monitoring of busi-ness processes are not new concepts to the busi-ness community. Circa 1993, workflow became an integral part of the enterprise content man-agement solution set and lexicon. Despite this, data collected from more than 354 business us-ers and released in the AIIM report, “Market IQ on Business Process Management,” shows 48% of respondents indicating that their organizations lacked consistent practices and that management of processes lacks any formal strategy. As shown in Figure 2, only 3% felt their organizations had achieved process excellence. (See Figure 1 for a definition of the five levels of business process management maturity.)
For most organizations, adoption of BPM is not strategic or positioned across the organization. Despite decades of market attention, its infiltra-tion from manufacturing into knowledge work and
By Carl Frappaolo
Enterprise lacks consistent practices/management is reactive. Little to no
BPM strategy, process redesign is ad hoc at best.
Stabilization of local work through department-level expertise, control, and metrics. Processes are
repeatable and documented.
Enterprise-wide process improvement competencies with
product and service orientation. Best practices are standardized and
documented.
The enterprise has established common, integrated assets and processes with
measurement and predictability. Variations of process performance are
minimal, and processes are stable.
Process excellence and reengineerting is fully integrated into the organization.
Emphasis on continuous improvement.
LEVEL 1 InITIAL
LEVEL 2 MAnAGED
LEVEL 3 STAnDARDIZED
LEVEL 4 PREDICTABLE
LEVEL 5 OPTIMIZInG
FIGURE 1 BuSInESS PROCESS MATuRITy MODEL
Carl Frappaolo is president of Information Architected and former VP of AIIM market intelligence. He blogs at www.takingaiim.com
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across all industries has been a slow journey. The problem lies in the fact that processes are the core of any functioning organization. Nonetheless, our research found most organizations do not have a process governance document or a chief process officer (Figure 3). It is not surprising, therefore, that organizations continue to cite lack of under-standing and executive sponsorship as primary obstacles to BPM implementation (Figure 4).
Until BPM is addressed strategically, it is likely to remain underappreciated, breeding continued lack of executive sponsorship. This is despite the fact that those in our survey who implemented BPM strategically experienced a positive ROI in less than three years.
FIGURE 2 IDEnTIFy ThE MATuRITy LEVEL OF yOuR ORGAnIZATIOn OVERALL, AnD OF yOuR DEPARTMEnT/BuSInESS unIT
first
3%
5%
LEVEL 1
InITIAL
LEVEL 2
MAnAGED
LEVEL 3
STAnDARDIZED
LEVEL 4
PREDICTABLE
LEVEL 5
OPTIMIZInG
6%
7%
14%
29%
16%
35%
48%
37%
first BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode
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first
FIGURE 3
DOES yOuR ORGAnIZATIOn hAVE A ChIEF PROCESS OFFICER?90% no10% yes
DOES yOuR ORGAnIZATIOn hAVE A PROCESS GOVERnAnCE DOCuMEnT?
62% no19% yes, as part of a larger governance document19% yes, as a standalone document
LACK OF unDERSTAnDInG
21%
uSER RESISTAnCE
10%COST
11%LACK OF
STRATEGy
11%
LACK OF ExECuTIVE-LEVEL
SPOnSORShIP
17%
FIGURE 4 whAT ARE/wERE ThE PRIMARy OBSTACLES TO BPM In yOuR ORGAnIZATIOn?
BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode
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information heritage
‘ The Most Argentine woman’Restoring and digitizing the library collection of Victoria Ocampo
A movement is under way in Latin America—a movement to restore the life that was Victoria Ocampo. In 2003, a project was launched to con-serve the architecture, garden, artwork, furnishings, and library at the Villa Ocampo, the estate owned by the person writer Jorge Luis Borges called “the most Argentine woman.” Now that much of Victoria Ocampo’s property has been restored, at-tention is shifting to preserving and sharing her library collec-tion.
Victoria Ocampo was a re-markable woman. In 1931, she founded Sur, considered to be the foremost Latin American
literary magazine of the 20th century. In doing so, she intro-duced modernism to Argen-tina and influenced its culture. “Nothing can compare to what she did for Latin America,” says Villa Ocampo Executive Direc-tor Dr. Nicolás Helft.
In 1973, six years before she died, Ocampo willed her villa and its contents to the United Nations Educational, Scien-tific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Today, Villa Ocam-po staff members are using digitization technologies to preserve Ocampo’s extensive literature collection and share it with a global audience.
By Becky Martins
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Victoria Ocampo, circa 1910. Born in Buenos
Aires in 1890, she was the publisher of the magazine Sur and a writer and critic
in her own right.
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A CuLTuRAL EnTREPREnEuROcampo advanced the con-dition of women, influenced famous writers, and brought together people with dif-ferent ideas and dissimilar backgrounds. Often, the Villa Ocampo was the backdrop for these meetings. More than a residence, Ocampo’s home was also a gathering place for Argentine and foreign intellec-tuals including Igor Stravinsky, Albert Camus, and Graham Greene. Located 19 miles north of Buenos Aires, the property
provided a grand refuge for visitors. But it fell into disrepair after Ocampo’s death in 1979.
The material she willed to UNESCO included nearly 12,000 books as well as let-ters, personal papers, and other communications. The mate-rial was later discovered to be uniquely personal, containing handwritten commentaries, inscriptions, and annotations. With most of the villa now ren-ovated and open to the public, Dr. Helft is shifting his attention to this collection.
“Nearly 20,000 visitors toured the house and garden last year,” Dr. Helft says. “But we couldn’t show them the library—probably one of the most attractive and telling parts of the house. We want to make it a truly great library that will explain Argentina’s cultural history in the 20th century.”
AnThOLOGy OF An InTELLECTuALThe task of preserving the col-lection involves multiple steps: cleaning and disinfection, con-servation and restoration, digi-tization, and publishing.
Ocampo’s collection had been stored in boxes, and many of the books were in poor con-dition. Dr. Helft and his staff began with the intimidating job of taking inventory. Even with such a large collection, it was necessary to research the importance of every book. Dr. Helft hired Ernesto Montquín, editor of several books by Vic-toria and Silvina Ocampo, who spent two months assessing the intellectual history of the library. Staff members loaded the expert’s findings into a da-tabase designed in-house.
After the initial qualification phase concluded in May 2008,
‘ The Most Argentine woman’
Victoria Ocampo’s library
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‘ The Most Argentine woman’
every book was cleaned with a special vacuum. Two conserva-tion specialists supervised by a senior conservationist from the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo (National Museum of Decorative Arts) in Buenos Aires then physically reviewed each item, checking both for annotations and for evidence of worm or insect damage. Infected books were shipped offsite, fumigated, cleaned, and restored.
Another detail Dr. Helft had to consider was space. Even with two large library rooms upstairs and a small one on the ground floor, the Villa Oca-mpo can only display 7,000 of Ocampo’s books. To resolve the dilemma, every book was cleaned, but the 5,000 least significant pieces were put into archival storage.
It was time for the team to
turn their attention to digitiz-ing Ocampo’s most noteworthy items.
TwO MInuTES A BOOKWorking with a limited bud-get, Dr. Helft and his staff pur-chased a PC and scanner to capture cover illustrations and notations written on interior pages. They devoted 30 sec-onds to two minutes to each book, using custom-designed software to check for accuracy and automate major parts of the scanning and thus speed up the process.
“The software we developed automates this procedure,” Dr. Helft explains. “It automatically resets resolution preferences for each type of scan, for ex-ample, ‘book cover’ or ‘page of manuscript.’ It also automati-cally corrects image colors and adds the metadata about the
scanned images.” Such cus-tomization has made digitiz-ing nearly 15,000 pages fairly efficient.
The Villa Ocampo staff over-sees daily data backup to a server and a weekly backup to an external drive kept off-premises. In terms of online backup, newly scanned data is uploaded with the rest of Villa Ocampo’s business-data back-ups to an Internet server.
Categorized by genre and author, the cover art and anno-tations from Ocampo’s books and the images of her letters, manuscripts, and other per-sonal correspondence will be made public on the Web by late 2008.
A LOnG LITERARy TRAILThere is a second aspect to the digitization project, one that extends beyond the Villa Oca-
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mpo. Through careful cross-in-dexing, the new Web page will showcase the collection held in Argentina and direct users to even more information dis-persed elsewhere, including the Victoria Ocampo collections held at Harvard and Princeton universities.
“We consider our library to be similar to an art collection,” Dr. Helft says. “When you visit the website of a good art muse-um, you see timelines, informa-tion about the civilizations that
created the art, and links to the objects themselves. When you make a library collection, you also think collectively. you think about all you’re going to tell the public. That is the idea of this library.”
When the website launches, Dr. Helft and his team will monitor visits to see who is us-ing it. Using those statistics to establish an appropriate audi-ence, Dr. Helft plans one day to publish a book document-ing the restoration project and
the life of Ocampo. The book, he hopes, will reach those who have not visited the web-site or Villa Ocampo’s library, which eventually will be open to researchers and the general public.
Victoria Ocampo was always unpretentious, and she regard-ed her house as a normal home, not an extraordinary villa. Dr. Helft believes she might be taken aback to learn how much influence she actually had. As is the case with so many vision-aries, the consequences of her actions were recognized late. According to Dr. Helft, “She had so much opposition dur-ing her life. I think she would be most surprised that people in Argentina approve of her work today.” p
Ø For more information, visit www.villaocampo.org.
‘ The Most Argentine woman’
The beautifully restored Villa Ocampo is now the setting for many cultural events.
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research notes
Stuart Madnick on unlocking Scientific Data
Stuart Madnick is the John nor-ris Maguire Professor of Infor-mation Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and professor of Engineering Systems at the MIT School of Engineer-ing. he is also co-head of MIT’s Total Data Quality Management and the Productivity from Infor-mation Technology programs. Professor Madnick is widely known for his research into ways of integrating information sys-tems, giving organizations a more global view of their operations. he spoke recently with ON about DataSpace, a dramatic new ap-proach to data management and long-term curation that accom-modates multiple, heterogeneous data from a variety of distributed locations.
Could you explain the goals and focus of DataSpace?The project’s main objective, initially, is to enable scientists to easily access, aggregate, and re-use data across disciplines. The motivation behind the initiative was the tremendous amount of scientific informa-
tion that is increasingly being captured and stored, whether that is happening automatically through sensors or through people typing on keyboards. In the past, that information wasn’t saved often because it was simply too expensive. When I worked for IBM back in
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the 1960s, their first disk drive for the IBM 360 mainframe was the model 2311—which held about 10 megabytes and was the size of a washing ma-chine. Clearly, thanks in part to companies like EMC, the world has changed dramatically in those few decades.
However, accessibility to scientific data hasn’t advanced as much, in many ways. We have more and more informa-tion that we know less and less about. For instance, two blocks from my office is the Broad Institute, a genomics research center founded by MIT and Harvard. They now generate about a petabyte of data (about 100 million of those IBM 2311 disk drives) per year, and the growth rate of data has been rapidly increasing. In some scientific fields, that rate of growth is even higher. But for
researchers, especially those outside a given organization, it is still not easy to locate and re-use that information. We have several centuries of experience in publishing scientific conclu-sions—but the voluminous data that backs them up is still not published or made available in a systematic way.
Is the DataSpace initiative of interest only to the scientific community?This is a wide-ranging project that will address many informa-tion management issues. For instance, how is information to be identified and shared? What kind of policies do people want to have in terms of shar-ing and protecting information? What’s the best way to manage complexity? Is it possible to harness collective intelligence? The answers to these types of
questions will have important implications beyond access to scientific data.
As part of this initiative we formed a DataSpace advisory board. One of the members is Dan Schutzer, executive direc-tor of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. The members of that consortium don’t do science but they do have a need to store and re-trieve tremendous amounts of financial data. We think DataSpace will also be use-ful for nonscientific data, and the nonscientific applications may actually help underwrite the needed infrastructure, the same way that the Internet, which started with solely a sci-entific focus, has become valu-able in many other domains.
Why did you and MIT get interested in this problem?
research notes
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Many scientists argue that important scientific advances are limited by the current di-versity of data formats, man-agement and access policies, tools for visualization and use, preservation strategies, and in-ability to easily extract needed subsets from enormous data collections. The DataSpace infrastructure will empower researchers to effectively utilize all relevant data sources.
Several years ago, MIT led the effort to develop DSpace, which was designed to provide MIT faculty and research-ers with stable, long-term storage for their digital re-search—mostly in the form of documents. That open source effort has been so successful it has been adopted globally by more than 500 academic and research organizations. DataSpace is the logical next
step to address similar needs for scientific data.
At MIT we believe in open-ness, though we realize in prac-tice there may be reasons to limit openness. DataSpace will incorporate a rule-based sys-tem whereby data can be made available to the extent its origi-nators feel is acceptable: It can be as limited or as open as they want. It would also help define the quality of the data and how it was obtained so that people will know if they are comparing apples to apples.
How would DataSpace help its users understand the context in which the data was created?A key aspect of DataSpace is the use of metadata—data about the data. So a key task is building up a context definition that gives us the ability to de-
fine exactly what we mean and then refine further. We think it is very important because even with scientific data, we tend to take a lot for granted, and when you take the data out of its context—whether that’s out of an institution or project or to another country or another field—those assumptions can get lost or misunderstood.
So we have looked exten-sively at data semantics. For example, we have found that in geographic data, there are many different coordinate sys-tems in use. Even the U.S. Army has two different coordinate systems in place, one used by the artillery command and the other by the missile command. As you might imagine, these issues can produce significant problems. There are many such issues, ranging from simple ones such as different measur-
research notes
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ing systems (e.g., meters vs. feet) to much more complex ones.
Are you going to focus initially on specific disciplines?We are going to start with life sciences, specifically neurosci-ence, and energy/environmen-tal sciences. In fact, we are looking at the diverse data used in the study of climate change. But one of the powerful things we anticipate will happen once we start with these specific disciplines is the ability to go across fields and put together connections that might not be obvious. DataSpace will bol-ster what Tim Berners-Lee, the “father of the Web,” calls the serendipitous re-use of data—where a third party could see new value in existing data.
How is the National Science Foundation involved with DataSpace?The DataSpace initiative is motivated by the National Sci-ence Foundation’s Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (Da-taNet) initiative. NSF intends to fund five experiments, and we hope that DataSpace is one of them. A key issue for NSF, and something that is an important part of our proposal, is long-term sustainability: The infra-structure we will develop will be deployable by any organiza-tion that manages data and will be scalable over time.
NSF’s plan calls for three stages. The first five years will focus on building up the infra-structure and getting at least our two pilot domains well established. The next five years would be transitional, with NSF
funding on a declining scale. After 10 years, the NSF would like to walk away from the proj-ect and assume that there will be enough people in the scien-tific community and beyond to support it.
What do you see as your biggest challenge?There are many challenges, but implementation is a big one—even great ideas do not always work out. The good news is that we are not inventing anything for which there is no precedent, but a project of this scope, which combines all these ideas, has never been done before. We have faith that we can do it, but it is not a trivial thing. p
ØFor more on Professor Madnick’s work, go to http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html.
John White, OBE, is head of manufacturing, RBS Americas. He joined Royal Bank of Scotland in 1999 and headed the massive IT integration project that resulted from the Royal Bank acquiring National Westminster Bank, which was several times larger. Prior to that, John spent six years with the National Australia Bank. He was honored with an Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen in 2003 and has won numerous international awards, including the 2008 EMC Information Leadership Award, for his excellence in managing information technology. John spoke with ON about his passion for—and proven track record of—aligning IT with the business.
You may be the world’s only IT executive—especially within the banking industry—who holds the title of head of manufacturing. What exactly does the title mean and what are your responsibilities?Back in November 1999, when the Royal Bank of Scotland was preparing to launch a bid to take over National Westmin-ster Bank, we realized that if we were successful in this effort, we would acquire a number of additional retail brands. We recognized that if we acquired four, five, or six retail brands, the operating and technical processes for all should be exactly the same. Therefore, if you open a savings account or a checking account, that process should be the same in every bank within the same environ-ment. The back-office systems
should be made common as well, and we should have a single, centralized operations facility to handle operations, technology, property, purchas-ing, and other activities. We decided to call that back-office organization “manufacturing,” in that we manufactured things for the front office, for the sales guys.
In the U.k., we’ve been able to remove a lot of cost, estab-lish a tremendous number of common processes, and cre-ate new technology programs that can be done only once and rolled out over the various brands. Earlier this year, we decided to develop a similar organization for the Americas, to include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argen-tina, Colombia, and Venezuela. And that’s what I’m doing here.
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You’ve been outspoken about the idea that IT people should be able to “dance with the business”—in other words, know the language of business and be aligned with and contributing to an organization’s revenue goals. Which do you think is the greater challenge: getting traditional IT people to be knowledgeable and conversant in business matters, or getting management to see the need to involve IT in business matters proactively?Definitely the former. I think IT people need to forget a little bit of being IT and think a little bit more about the organiza-tion and the industry in which they work. Thirty or 40 years ago, the IT guy was the only one who knew how to plug in and operate the big machines,
but nowadays most business leaders have a reasonably good understanding of technology. The magic, this sprinkling of stardust that technology had, has eroded a little bit. And so I think it behooves technology people to shift gears, get more involved, and gain a better understanding of the business in which they’re applying tech-nology. If you can speak to the business people in their own language, you can be more use-ful to them.
Where will young IT professionals coming out of college these days get these
kinds of skills, since colleges aren’t teaching them to think this way?One of the things we did a few years ago was to develop a Master of Science degree in conjunction with the Univer-sity of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Strathclyde is traditionally an engineering-based university, but we had long discussions with them about adding some banking content to their M.Sc. program in technology. We essentially entered into a joint venture with the university and helped fund the development of the course. So now any Royal Bank employee who wants to
IT Steps Out
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“[At RBS], we’ve been able to remove a lot of costs, establish a tremendous number of common processes, and create new technology programs that can be done only once and rolled out over the various brands.”
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apply for this degree can do so and complete it within three years. We give them some time off each week for their course-work. It’s an accredited degree program, and about 30-plus people on our staff now have this M.Sc. on their resume. I think this would be valuable and replicable for other indus-tries as well, such as medicine.
Given their technology-related responsibilities, how do IT people allocate the time needed to come up with new ideas for the business, as opposed to being in a more reactive, project-based mode?That’s a good question and it really comes down to what is the culture within the company. If the culture is one that says, “IT, sit on your backsides, write code, test it, and let’s get the
products launched,” you get a manufacturing type of IT, don’t you? On the other hand, if you have the kind of culture more typically found in smaller orga-nizations, one that says, “I don’t care what your title is, whether you’re the senior VP or whether you’re the coffee maker, it’s the power of the idea and the power of the innovation that counts,” that’s where IT people can add the most value.
The fact is, you can’t insti-tutionalize innovation—but you can foster a culture where innovation is encouraged and welcome from all levels. This requires giving your people a bit of freedom, and then you also have to mentor them and support them. you have to al-low them to fail as well as to succeed. So I think the corpo-rate culture is more important than anything that training or
scheduling could give them.
Getting back to this idea of “dancing with the business.” If you’re going to do that, if IT and business are going to be aligned and work together, and if they’re “dancing,” who leads?Both of them, and I mean that genuinely. At any one time, any one day, any one project, one or the other should be prepared and able to lead. It could be the IT guy. But if you’re going to dance with the business, you need to understand what the business is trying to do, and you need to be able to talk to the business and share with the business the things that are important.
In any business, the most important questions are: Are we selling the products suc-cessfully? Are we enjoying high
IT Steps Out
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customer confidence and high customer rating? Have we done anything to damage our reputa-tion? Clearly, we would want to know these things on a day-to-day basis.
Now, if you’re a technology guy, you can’t afford to remain detached from that kind of language or thinking. you need to ask yourself, “Hey, am I run-ning my programs and projects within budget? Am I delivering quality products? Have I dam-aged my reputation? Have I delivered what the customer wanted when he wanted it?” The questions are simple, but they matter. Every business has competitors, and so do IT shops. There’s always an out-sourcer looking to supplant you. Start by running IT like a business, and before long you’ll be able to play a role in running the larger business.
In the future, do you see companies’ IT infrastructures becoming more or less the same or will there still be an opportunity for the technologist to make a strategic difference?If the pace of technological change is going to keep up—and it will keep up and get even faster—it’s inevitably going to bring with it a lot of different new ways of doing business. Take security in the bank-ing industry, for example. It’s moved on from just dealing with the security of monies to now dealing with security of personal information. There’s a huge growth area, and it is all technology-based.
The increasing pace of tech-nology change has added new levels of sophistication to the deployment of IT. But these complex processes are still
principally manual. you may remember that IT products were sold in the early 1990s to support the reengineering and redesigning of processes. That was all the rage then—process management. Eventually, other fashions took its place. But sometime in the future that’s going to come back, offering the ability to almost auto-matically create processes that meet certain criteria. you will be able to get failsafe processes installed and people quickly trained to manage those pro-cesses much more efficiently than today.
I think technology-sup ported process engineering will un-dergo a rebirth in the future to handle the ever-increasing levels of sophistication and complexity. p
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LandBy Jean GogolinGreen
U.S. CITIeS and STaTeS STrenGThen TheIr Green aGenda
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High schools with solar panels. Robust recycling programs. Water reclamation. Data centers that are virtualizing servers and storage. Across the United States, cities and states are going green.
LandGreenWhERE:Bellevue, Washington WhO:Chief Technology Officer Chelo Picardal (left) and Assistant to the City Manager Sheida Sahandy have both been involved in efforts to reduce Bellevue’s carbon footprint. WhAT: The city’s environmental education center, pictured here, overlooks Mercer Slough, the largest of Lake Washington’s freshwater wetlands and Bellevue’s largest park.
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They’re conserving natural resources, reducing their car-bon footprint, and minimizing the environmental impact of growing populations. Belle-vue, Washington, even has a big-footed cartoon character named Carbon yeti to encour-age its citizens to reduce their
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WhERE: St. Petersburg, Florida WhO: Mike Connors is environmental services administrator for the city, pictured on one of the area’s many hiking and walking trails.WhAT: Green initiatives include converting traffic signals to more energy-efficient LEDs, using ethanol and biodiesel in city vehicles, and programs to conserve water and preserve estuaries.
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footprint by conserving energy and recycling. ON looks at the efforts being undertaken by Bellevue, St. Petersburg, Florida, and a key state department in Massachusetts.
ThE VIEw FROM BELLEVuE
Once just a suburb of Seattle, Bellevue now has a population of 120,000. The city has been called one of the most livable in America, with extensive parks and canoeing within an easy walk of a newly vibrant down-town. In cooperation with the Pacific Science Center, the city has built an environmental edu-cation center that perches over Mercer Slough, the largest of Lake Washington’s freshwater wetlands and Bellevue’s larg-est park. It has even instituted a program to preserve its tree canopy.
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by starting a multi-pronged approach called the Environ-mental Stewardship Initiative. The city is transitioning its municipal vehicles to hybrids. At the city hall’s central con-course, there are auto-sensors that open windows for natural ventilation. Municipal employ-ees who carpool or use public transportation can use city vehicles to run errands during the day and are guaranteed a ride home if they need to stay late. Bellevue has converted its traffic lights to LEDs and is running a pilot program for more energy-efficient street lighting. It has instituted vigor-ous outreach programs further encouraging citizens to reduce the city’s carbon footprint.
Says Sheida Sahandy, as-sistant to City Manager Steve Sarkozy and senior policy advi-sor for strategic planning, “Like
most cities, we have vertically organized departments for transportation, utilities, parks, and so on. But our environmen-tal actions cut across all those silos, so we’ve developed a horizontal initiative that weaves across these departments.”
Bellevue officials took a baseline inventory of the city’s emissions, both as a munici-pality and as a community, in 2001 and 2006. Then they did a “backcast” to 1990 to estab-lish a benchmark and forecasts to 2010 and 2020 that take likely population growth into account. Together, the data are being used to plan future steps.
IT DOES ITS PART
Bellevue’s IT operations group
has undertaken strong green initiatives. Four years ago, the city’s data center began decommissioning servers and moving applications to VMware, putting 30 applications on one host. The city is studying virtual storage as well, and is committed to Energy Star compliance for its PCs, laptops, monitors, and printers.
Other moves include turning off PCs at night, setting moni-tors to turn off after a period of inactivity, using biodegradable materials wherever possible, setting printers for double-sid-ed printing, monitoring power use, and encouraging major vendors to institute their own green initiatives. Future plans include more videoconferenc-
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GARBAGE In, POwER OuT A facility in Pinellas County, Florida, converts tons of garbage into enough energy to power 45,000 homes.
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ing and increasing equipment lifecycles.
The goal, says CTO Chelo Picardal, is to shrink the IT department’s energy consump-tion significantly to support the city’s commitment to cut green-house gas emissions.
COnSERVInG EnERGy In ST. PETE
St. Petersburg, Florida, is anoth-er city at the ocean’s edge, and like Bellevue, it offers extensive amenities, among them more than 90 miles of biking and walking trails, the largest net-work in the southeast United States. Its environmentally con-scious citizens and businesses recycle 50% more than the national average. Some 80% of its population of 250,000 has Internet access.
Mayor Rick Baker, now in his
LandGreenWhERE: Boston Common, one of the oldest public green spaces in the U.S. WhO: Deborah Quinn is CIO for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.WhAT: MassDEP has cut its energy consumption by decommissioning 52 servers and consolidating the affected computing resources onto a blade system. The department is also moving information online so citizens and officials can access it without having to travel.
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second term, has aggressively encouraged green initiatives. Two years ago, working with the Florida League of Cities, he instituted the Mayors’ Green City Action Accord to establish pragmatic, measurable, and cost-effective criteria for envi-ronmental enhancements and energy savings. Baker also co-chairs the state’s Action Team on Energy and Climate Change.
More than 60 Florida cit-ies have signed the Green City Action Accord, and according to Mike Connors, administra-tor of St. Pete’s environmental services, other cities through-out the country have expressed interest.
A FIRST FOR FLORIDA
St. Pete was the first city in the state to be named a Green City by the Florida Green Building
Coalition. Like Bellevue, St. Pete has converted its traffic signals to LEDs, which will save $150,000 a year. The city has programs to conserve water, preserve estuaries, and use fuel-efficient technologies. Recently, it announced an executive order to create a “carbon scorecard” to measure facility energy use, use ethanol and biodiesel in the city’s vehicle fleet, and convert incandescent lights to compact fluorescent ones.
The city has one of the coun-try’s largest reclaimed water systems as well as a highly successful yard-waste-to-mulch program. One of its high schools meets 15% of its en-ergy requirements with solar panels.
One of the area’s most im-pressive environmental projects is the Pinellas County Waste-
to-Energy Facility, which an-nually converts 124,000 tons of incinerated garbage to elec-tricity—enough, when fed into the area’s power grid, to supply electricity to 45,000 homes, or about a sixth of the county. Nearly 85% of all garbage col-lected in St. Pete is converted to electricity at the plant, which although built in the 1970s, is still state-of-the-art and emits significantly less greenhouse gases than many comparable facilities. The facility uses mag-nets to separate metals from trash, so they, too, can be re-cycled.
VIRTuALIZATIOn IS KEy
St. Pete’s IT department began going green four years ago and has since virtualized 17 servers onto two. The department already has a storage area
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network, which stores information more efficiently than individual units at lower cost. Explains city CIO Muslim Gadiwalla, “Every piece of equipment we buy is Energy Star certified, and systems are set to ‘wake-on LAN’ so upgrades can be done at night without leaving them on all night. When we retire servers, we use them for testing.
“We’re looking at desktop virtualization—in effect go-ing back to the days of dumb terminals—and we’re studying a variety of ways to use less power to cool our data centers.”
Moving city services online reduces the energy impact of citizens having to travel to City Hall to access services. It also reduces financial and environ-mental costs related to print-ing, mailing, and disposal of the resulting paper. The city has
begun online billing for utility service and is handling recruit-ment, vendor registration, RFPs, and purchase orders online as well.
MASSDEP STEPS uP
In Massachusetts, the state Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) is part of the Executive Office of Energy and Environment, a linkage only a few other states have made. MassDEP’s IT department, headed by CIO Deborah Quinn, is centralized in Boston and has four regional offices with net-work managers.
Quinn echoes the explosion-of-servers problem experienced by Bellevue and St. Petersburg. “We used to get a new server
virtually every time we added a new application,” says Quinn. “By the time we got to 80, we had massive storage problems. So in early 2008, we put to-gether a proposal to virtualize them.”
Since then, the department has decommissioned 52 serv-ers and now uses a blade sys-tem with six blades. Noting the side benefits of virtualization, Quinn says, “We’ve cut the time it takes to set up a new service from a day and a half to a half hour. Before we vir-tualized, we were just doing incremental backups because full backups took so long. Now we can do a full backup in 24 hours, which means we can do them over the weekend. We’re more efficient, we’re using less
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CAn I BORROw ThE CAR? Bellevue municipal employees who use public transportation can borrow city vehicles to run errands during the day.
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energy for cooling, and we’re able to tackle projects that had been sitting on the back burn-er.”
Quinn says her department has benchmarked how much energy it’s using and is looking at additional ways to reduce its carbon footprint. “Our goal is to put as much information online for officials and average citizens as possible, so people will have less need to drive to our region-al offices.” p
900-Plus Cities Take a Stand on Climate ChangeIn november 2007, American mayors gathered in Seattle for a summit on climate change hosted by the u.S. Conference of Mayors and launched the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to advance the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. To date, more than 900 u.S. cities have signed the agreement. (To learn more about the u.S. Conference of Mayors, visit www.usmayors.org.)
under the agreement, participating cities commit to taking three actions:
Strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own p
communitiesurge their state government and the federal government to enact p
programs that meet the greenhouse gas emission targets suggested for the united States by the Kyoto Protocolurge the u.S. Congress to pass greenhouse gas reduction legislation. p
The Kyoto Protocol’s goal for the united States is a 7% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012. Many knowledgeable observers, including St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker, consider this target unrealistic. Still, local governments are in a position to influence activities in their communities that contribute significantly to climate change including energy and land use, transportation, waste management, and infrastructure investments.
One problem, says St. Petersburg environmental services administrator Mike Connors, is that there are many more small cities than large ones—but collectively, they have less money to spend on environmental initiatives. One solution may be more regional initiatives. “Green energy is a very big challenge,” says Connors. “Fortunately, there are a lot of minds working on it. There are even people looking at ways to harness the wind created by traffic on interstate highways.”
If those minds are successful, the story five years from now—or 10—may be very different from today’s. Meanwhile, American cities and states are doing their part to influence it.
president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward-looking technology advisory firm. Due to the steep
decline of worldwide financial markets and the meteoric rise and collapse of oil prices, the second half of 2008 was a roller coaster ride that made anything you might find at an amusement park tame by comparison. Traumatic events like these tend to change how people do things, and what happens in 2009 will be no exception.
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’09we see three broad themes growing out of these larger events and resonating in the technology world over the coming year: energy conservation, the increased demand for information security, and the relentless march toward fully mobile computing that allows users to access all their digital content from anywhere. The bottom line: A year from now, we’ll all be closer to living and working off our mobile devices and switching off our PCs and laptops.
1 The combination of an economic downturn, unpredictable energy costs, and sporadic energy shortages such as were recently experi-enced in the southeastern U.S., will accelerate the trend toward Green IT. Corporate purchas-ing practices will favor energy-efficient serv-ers, storage, and networking devices, which, in some cases, pay for themselves in a matter of months by reducing energy consumption. Virtualization, which further cuts energy costs by consolidating resources onto fewer devices, will continue to be a key theme in data cen-ters. Some companies may even be influenced to speed the transition to cloud computing (where energy costs are borne by the provider) in order to insulate themselves from dramatic energy price swings.
On the supply side of the energy equation, there are no quick solutions in sight. Alterna-tive energy sources will take years to develop and bring online; nuclear will take decades to go from concept to operating plant. With no silver bullet on the power-generation side, en-ergy conservation will be very big in 2009.
EnERGy COnSERVATIOn AnD GREEn IT
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’092 One byproduct of the economic downturn is that a large num-ber of tech-savvy people will lose their jobs worldwide. Inevi-tably, some will gravitate to-ward cybercrime to make ends meet, worsening an already harsh environment for informa-tion security.
Theft of personal informa-tion, which can be sold or ex-ploited online for criminal uses, continues to expand, and at-tack methods are increasingly sophisticated. For example, as consumers have become more vigilant about phishing—fraud-ulent mass e-mails that try to trick recipients into revealing personal information—a high-stakes and precisely targeted variant, spear phishing, has evolved. This method typically attempts to dupe corporate ex-ecutives into revealing sensitive corporate information by im-
personating trusted colleagues or customers.
In this climate, there will be a heavy focus in 2009 on au-thenticating user identities with greater certainty and assuring that confidential information remains confidential. One likely result is that passwords, which are easily compromised, will fall into massive disfavor and be supplanted by more robust access controls, such as strong authentication methods that provide a higher level of assur-ance that users are who they claim to be. Information itself will be better-protected using tools such as encryption and data loss prevention. Increas-ingly, storage for enterprises, small businesses, and even consumers will be connected to cloud-based secure stor-age services backed by major branded vendors.
SECuRITy IS A PRIORITy
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’093 In 2008, the iPhone and similar products gained wide accep-tance, making services more affordable and triggering a vir-tual tsunami of offerings. 2009 will be the year people realize they want all their digital “stuff” (phone, voicemail, apps, music, movies, e-mail) to be acces-sible anywhere, from a single mobile device—and in a secure manner. That vision is moving closer to reality, thanks to the ongoing buildout of WiMAX infrastructure and the avail-ability of wireless broadband connectivity services that allow users to take their broadband experience with them.
Users will be able to store their content with the pro-vider, where it will be properly protected and backed up, two tasks consumers are notori-ously poor at doing themselves.
This latter capability will in-crease users’ trust in mobile computing. Services that sync users’ home and office data and documents to their mobile devices (or otherwise provide access) should ramp strongly, as will the sale of the devices themselves. By the end of the year, users will even be able to access other devices, such as home security cameras, from their mobile device. When peo-ple have access to their content wherever they go, increased productivity and new applica-tions will quickly follow.
GOInG MASSIVELy MOBILE
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’09! In 2009, conservation efforts will lower our energy consump-tion. We’ll shift our sensi-tive electronic assets off our energy-hogging PCs and onto remote services that are effi-ciently managed and locked up behind much stronger access controls. Nonetheless, our con-tent and favorite applications will remain accessible to us via handheld devices that are with us wherever we go.
As we become electronically untethered from our home and office systems, let’s hope we all use this freedom to enjoy the world more. In any case, these changes will allow us to make more informed decisions and become better employees and more engaged members of so-ciety. And in a few short years, we’ll likely wonder how anyone lived without a mobile Internet device or smart phone. p
ThE DIGITAL wORLD In 2009: EFFICIEnT, SAFE, AnD MOBILE
ROB EndERlE“As we become electronically untethered from our home and office systems, let’s hope we all use this freedom to enjoy the world more.”
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Business process reengineering was seen as an exciting new management idea in the early 1990s, but most of its components weren’t entirely new. Reengineering was just one of several approaches to improving business processes, and its fortunes can’t be understood without reference to the broader topic of process improvement and management.
The idea that work can be viewed as a process, and then improved, is hardly new. It dates at least to Frederick Taylor at the turn of the last century. Taylor and his colleagues developed modern industrial engineering and process improvement, though the techniques were restricted to manual labor and production processes. The next great addition to process management was created by the combination of Taylorist process improvement and statistical process control. The pioneers of this movement from the 1920s to the 1960s
Thomas h. DavenporT | Whence IT came, Where IT’s GoInG
I am often asked by business journalists whether the age of reengineering is over. At first, I was surprised by the question. I see the “age of reengineering” as just beginning. Most companies have only started to make the process changes they will eventually make. But over the years, I have realized how many managers experience new ideas as fads, especially when the ideas are misunderstood or poorly executed.
The book that Mike Hammer and I co-authored and published in 1992, Reengineering the Corporation, made the case for dramatic work change. We argued that processes, not tasks, should be the focus of work design. We were serious in our intent. We were not in the business of creating a fad. We knew that our ideas were important but didn’t anticipate how they would become popularized. The book has sold more than three million copies, in two dozen languages.
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Thomas Davenport is the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. For his tribute
to Mike Hammer, go to http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/ and scroll down.
Jim Champy is Chairman of Perot Systems’ consulting practice.
Business process reengineering as we know it today arose in the early 1990s, when many Western firms were facing an economic recession and strong competi-tion from Japanese competitors. Michael Hammer, Jim Champy, and I were the earliest writers on the topic, although there were ultimately many sources and authors.
Reengineering added to the ge-neric set of process management ideas several new approaches:
The radical (rather than p
incremental) redesign and improvement of workAttacking broad, cross- p
functional business processes“Stretch” goals of order-of- p
magnitude improvementUse of information technology p
as an enabler of new ways of working
Reengineering was also the first process management movement to address nonpro-duction, white-collar processes such as order management, and customer service. It did not, however, emphasize statistical process control or continuous improvement. Many firms in the U.S. and Europe undertook reengineering projects, but most proved to be overly ambi-tious and difficult to implement. Reengineering often degener-ated into a more respectable word for headcount reductions, and then largely gave way to other process management ap-proaches.OThER APPROAChES EMERGE
Not all companies embraced re-engineering. Toyota, in particu-lar, developed a more conserva-tive and systematic approach to process management. The
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Toyota Production System (TPS) combined statistical process control with continuous learning by decentralized work teams, a “pull” approach to manufacturing that minimized waste and inventory, and treat-ed every small improvement in processes as an experiment to be designed, measured, and learned from. A somewhat less stringent approach to TPS is present in the “lean” techniques that many American firms have recently adopted.
The most recent process management enthusiasm has revolved around Six Sigma, an approach created at Motorola in the 1980s and popularized by General Electric in the 1990s. The name Six Sigma suggests a return to statistical process control, but it more typically involves incremental improve-ment of small work processes
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on an episodic basis.While the management and
improvement of processes clearly has been a long-term business need, the proliferation of approaches to process man-agement may confuse some managers, and therefore a more integrated approach is desir-able. Some firms are beginning to combine Six Sigma with more radical reengineering-like approaches to processes, or with the “lean” techniques de-rived from the Toyota Produc-tion System.
Additionally, there is a small but growing “business process management” movement (see, for example, the BP Trends website at www.bptrends.com), which advocates an integrated approach to process improvement and the use of information technologies that support business processes.
ThE PRInCIPLES OF InTEGRATED PROCESS MAnAGEMEnTProcess management clearly needs to be a synthetic disci-pline. Each new process man-agement approach has built on previous foundations, and add-ed one or more new elements. By this point there are a variety of useful tools and techniques. An integrated approach can furnish the right technique for a particular business strategy and situation, although it requires sophisticated analysts who understand the broad array of tools at their disposal.
Integrated process manage-ment has some clear principles and defining elements. One is the emphasis on business pro-cesses: Michael Hammer often commented that “process” was the most important component of the term “business process
reengineering.” Another is the importance of human behavior: Firms will always need to ad-dress culture, leadership, and change management if they are going to improve their pro-cesses.
Admittedly, process man-agement has been somewhat faddish in the past. Perhaps the excitement of a new approach (or at least a new combina-tion of previous ideas with a new name) is necessary to get people excited, but unfortu-nately they eventually lose their excitement. Integrated business process management may not inspire the same level of pas-sion as previous process-based enthusiasms such as reen-gineering, but perhaps it will persist in organizations over the long run. p
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Mike passed away suddenly this year. He was an impos-ing character in the world of management thinking, and his work will continue to impact thousands of companies. We worked on the book together for almost three years—and then spent many more years teaching others what we knew. So for me, this has been a time to contemplate the past and consider reengineering’s future.whERE DID ThE IDEAS COME FROM?
We began working on the reengineering ideas in the mid 1980s. The global economy was entering a recession, and companies were looking for ways to become more efficient. We saw striking examples of lost time and money—like the insurance company that took 24 days to issue a simple insur-
ance policy and invoice, when the real work took only 10 minutes. At the same time, we saw a few companies becoming dramatically more efficient—like Toyota, which was doing the same work as Ford in a frac-tion of the time, with one tenth of the people.
We started to see that in-formation technology alone would not solve the problems of efficiency and effectiveness. Companies that just automated old processes didn’t gain much advantage. So we postulated the idea that the design of work needed to be reconsidered first, before technology was applied. Mike made the case forcefully in a strident article, “Obliterate, Don’t Automate.” We proved our point time after time, dem-onstrating that when work was designed from a process per-spective, costs, cycle time, and
quality could be dramatically improved.
We defined processes as a stream of related tasks that cut horizontally across an organiza-tion, like new customer acqui-sition or new product launch. Thinking this way came natu-rally to us—Mike and I were both engineers with a systems perspective. We saw work as a system with an output that benefited customers.hOw DID REEnGInEERInG COME TO BE SEEn AS A FAD?
Managers who saw reengineer-ing as a fad didn’t understand what we intended—or they were victims of reengineer-ing poorly implemented. The term became synonymous with downsizing. And for some companies, that’s all they did: downsize the workforce and call it reengineering. The people
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who were left had to figure out how to serve customers with dramatically fewer resources. It was a sad state, and Mike and I often took the blame. Many managers hoped that the “fad” would pass.But over the last couple of years, I have seen a renewed interest in our work and a new appreciation for process change. In some companies, the need and the appetite never went away. But today’s conditions—which in some ways resemble that earlier time and in other ways are different —suggest the re-emergence of reengineering.
whAT’S ThE SAME?WE’RE in ThE midST Of A RECES-SiOn. This is a more severe economic downturn than in the 1980s and early 1990s and will require dramatic actions for
companies to compete—and for some companies to survive. The one benefit of such chal-lenging times is that it’s easier to make the case for dramatic work change. But be careful not to focus on cost reduction alone. Be sure that you are also creating more value for cus-tomers; otherwise you might slip into just downsizing.
whAT’S DIFFEREnT?ThE WORld iS mORE ThAn flAT. Journalist Thomas Friedman was right in his description of the “flat” world. But he didn’t go far enough in describing the dramatic operating change that global markets demand. Process change is no longer internal to a company or a ge-ography. Work must be seam-lessly integrated across both corporate and global borders. Just look at how companies like
Nokia and Nintendo operate.
OPERATiOnAl ExCEllEnCE iS A dif-fEREnTiATOR. As the world be-comes more transparent, com-panies will have to compete on more than product quality. Look at how Internet services like VEHIX make the automotive industry completely transpar-ent to consumers. Increasingly, companies will compete on the basis of operational excellence, and operational excellence demands process excellence. Customers experience a com-pany’s processes as much as they experience its products. Process quality is more impor-tant today than it was in the last century.
TEChnOlOgy iS uBiquiTOuS. We wrote the reengineering book in pre-Internet times. We ar-gued that work could be reen-
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gineered, in many instances, without the aid of technology. Today, most process change is technology-enabled, and it takes a special skill to integrate process redesign with informa-tion technology. But the im-provement in business perfor-mance can be dramatic when process change and technology come together harmoniously. Look at how companies man-age supply chains today with sophistication and efficiency. It would not have been possible in 1990 because we did not have an easily accessible global technology infrastructure.
I see these changes as op-portunity—but Mike and I were always “glass half-full” thinkers. These are times when reengi-neering can do even more for companies, but it will take the right people with the right ap-petite for process and technol-
ogy change. And, yes, we were often accused of forgetting people in our ideas, but that was never the case. We always knew that it’s the combination of people, process, and tech-nology that creates great com-panies, and opportunity is here once again. p
A ThiRd ViEW fROm JOhn WhiTE Of RBS
“ SOmETimE in the future [reengineering is] going to come back, offering the ability to almost automatically create processes that meet certain criteria. You will be able to get failsafe processes installed and people quickly trained to manage those processes much more efficiently than today.”
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ThE InFORATI FILES Paul Kedrosky on dangerous news, information underload, and biodiversity in information markets By Tim Devaney and Tom Stein
last words
Paul Kedrosky wears many hats. He is a prominent venture capitalist, columnist, research fellow, and on-air commentator for CNBC. His blog, “Infectious Greed,” is considered a must-read in the technology industry—mostly because he’s not afraid to ruffle feathers. Whether Kedrosky is dissecting the subprime mortgage crisis or lifting the veil on the venture capital industry, people want to hear what he has to say.
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last words
“I’m in a perpetual argument with myself on pretty much everything, and I like arguing with the rest of the world about almost anything,” he says.
We reached him in San Di-ego.
You were recently named by Barron’s magazine as one of the best business bloggers. How did you get into blogging?In 1999 I started blogging just because it was an outlet. I used to write a lot of opinion columns for newspapers. Stuff that was too short for a column or that I just wanted to get off my mind I would post on my website. I actually wrote an application called GrokSoup that turned into the first hosted blogging site. And then, fool-ishly, I decided the blogging thing had peaked in 2001, so
I sold off the assets to a little software company.
How has blogging changed the news media landscape?I think it’s made news more dangerous, which is good. For most of my life, news never felt very dangerous. And now, for better or worse, news actually feels dangerous again. I think blogs play a huge role in that because news in general had become so censored, filtered, and sanitized. Go back to the original proto-blogger, Matt Drudge. He nearly brought down a president by ignoring news censorship.
When did you first understand the power of information?After I graduated from engi-neering school, I worked at Digital Equipment Corp. We
were a publicly traded com-pany, and we used to worry about how our stock was doing. And there were these analysts who were trafficking in this crazy information I never knew about—and I worked at the company. How the hell did they know all this stuff? And, more importantly, why was my stock off 10%? They were saying things with multi-billion-dollar consequences and materiality, causing people to make money and lose money. I wanted some of that.
How are you managing the information explosion?I was at a conference recently and a well-known pundit put out the view that we’re all suf-fering from information over-load. I was ticked off because that’s so blatantly untrue. I’m suffering from horrific infor-
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mation underload. The whole world is effectively instrument-ed, but I can’t get to the data I need. There is so much relevant and important information that I’m unable to get because it’s siloed or captured by people who are in a particular cabal that I’m not part of. I’m forced to deal with sanitized infor-mation that has gone through three different revisions and four editors before I see it. That’s offensive to me.
Is there any cure for that?I don’t think people even under-stand how to dimensionalize the problem. yeah, there is an explosion of all these differ-ent news sources online. But in terms of actually being exposed to what is impactful and impor-tant, are you getting it all or are you missing huge chunks of in-formation? What we found this
summer [with the financial cri-sis] is that everyone was fish-ing from the same information pond. We formed a super-port-folio where all the hedge funds were holding the same stocks. So when something went wrong it was like the whole market jumped to one side of the boat at the same time. That’s what happens when the biodiversity of information markets gets constrained or cut back as has happened over the last few years with the sanitiza-tion of news. In my mind, these things are linked.
What’s the most significant change in information
management in your lifetime?Hands down it’s search. The idea that so many sources of data are available to me from a single one-inch-by-quarter-inch box on a computer screen is still mind-boggling. The other thing that’s made a big difference is that storage has become free. I no longer think about what e-mails to keep. I was a raging deleter of every-thing for years and years. But I was bad at guessing what to keep and what to delete. Now I just save everything. p
ØFor other Inforati profiles, go to www.emc.com/inforati.
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I was a raging deleter of everything for years and years. But I was bad at guessing what to keep and what to delete. now I just save everything.
