By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 8th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Over the last few years we have seen a focus on the ability to embed BI functionality within business processes and there is also an increasing emphasis on being able to monitor the performance of business processes by means of BI. However, what we have not seen is the application of business process technology to the delivery of BI itself.

There are a number of good reasons why the delivery of BI reports and queries should be managed just like any other business process. In particular, it is important that the business can trust the information it is presented with and by applying process control you can potentially ensure that you know exactly when the data was last refreshed and that all relevant data has been correctly collected. In addition, you should have enough information to prioritise reports (for SLA purposes) in the case of an outage, you can provide data lineage for your reports (important for Sarbanes-Oxley and EuroSOX), you can determine impact analysis, and with suitable audit mechanisms in place you can determine who looks at what data, who does not and what data and reports are never looked at (which in turn should provide improved capacity planning). The value for data governance purposes should also not be under-estimated.

Of course, to do all of this is not trivial and it requires a range of rather different technologies. To begin with you need to be able to discover all of your data sources and transport mechanisms and collect relevant metadata (whether technical, operational or business oriented) from them. This means connectors that link to ETL processes, to databases and data warehouses, to spreadsheets and to BI query tools themselves; as well as the ability to handle metadata.

On top of that you will need to be able to document what you have discovered and to be able to represent your results graphically, both in workflow terms and with respect to things like data lineage. Further, you will need to be able to support versions of your BI processes because these may differ across your organisation because of factors such as time and geography, as well as organisational differences.

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that there are a dearth of companies offering such facilities though vendors such as SAP Business Objects, SAS and IBM Cognos certainly have the wherewithal to build such capabilities. In fact, the only company that I am aware of that has ventured into this area is Sybase and even in this case it is not a fully fledged corporate product.

What has happened is that Sybase Belgium has a built a suite of tools called BI-PM (business intelligence—process management), using existing Sybase products (such as PowerDesigner for visualisation) with extensions. It has also designed a methodology called SAFE BI-PM (Sybase Advanced Framework for Enabling BI-PM) around which it is providing consulting services for BI-PM. However, this currently remains a local initiative and it is only available within Benelux, Germany and Switzerland at present. If it proves successful then it will be adopted more widely by the company. I see no reason why this shouldn't be the case: the arguments in favour of such process management, as outlined, seem clear cut.

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By: Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst - Sustainability, Quocirca Posted: 8th September 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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Every so often something comes along that changes the established order. The most oft quoted examples in the technology marketplace are the internet, HTML, the ecommerce model, open source, and distributed computing. Some of them we see coming a mile off; the shift from the use of the internet as a research collaboration tool to one of transactional commerce was fairly obvious once HTML took the geek out of the game of browse and seek.

Others don’t seem as likely until the wave breaks and the slowly gathering tsunami washes away the existing structure and floods as far as the eye can see. Open source is a good example—many a market strategist at established vendors couldn’t get their heads around the concept of an IT department actually trusting their fate to a product that was created by an often faceless set of far flung and unbranded developers, not to mention that they didn’t believe those developers could or world work together in the first place. Of course the building momentum of a pending market disruption, nor its potential scale is ever invisible if you are close enough to it and have your eyes, ears and mind open.

Sustainability is going to change everything.

Sustainability efforts are going to be the big disruptor because it touches everything that businesses do and how they do it. Here is a by no means exhaustive list of what gets influenced to a significant degree:

• supply chains: where things are built and how they are assembled
• component choice, design, material inclusion and manufacturing method
• energy production and distribution techniques
• energy consumption availability and management
• go to market and sales models (for example the massive decline in centralised sales forces travelling extensively to clients throughout the sales cycle)
• a move from centralised offices back to distributed office parks; home working and remote working
• legislation and performance standards—ISO14064 and PAS2050 aside—we “ain’t seen nothing yet” but it is almost certain that emissions will become a strictly enforced area in the coming years
• accounting, reporting and transparency in emissions footprints
• as “contract and converge” plays out a restructuring of the economic justifications that currently support services offshoring will occur.

IT vendors, being businesses themselves, are of course affected by those factors as far as how they go to market. “Eating your own dog food” has long been a crude but often quoted proof point amongst vendors that they not only talk the talk, but eat their own words too. In the coming decade companies will minutely examine the performance of their suppliers as far as sustainability goes, with the imbedded carbon load in goods construction and services delivery being of acute concern. Standards like ISO14064 and the soon to be finalised PAS2050 will codify performance and provide performance transparency. Selling sustainability will be replaced by sustainable selling and all those years of greenwashing will be rued as years wasted.

The technology vendors develop and bring to market will also be directly influenced in various ways. IT will continue to do what IT has always done which is to serve the business, though it will first go through a period of squeezing out energy usage inefficiencies. As a phase, a focus on efficiency will likely peak in the next few years—lets say that by 2011 at the latest it’ll be something that is done as a matter of course and will no longer be a strong market differentiator for products or services. IT will be an enabler of travel avoidance. IT will be the engine of emissions accountancy just as it is the engine of financial accountancy; more interestingly it will likely be the data gatherer for emissions accountancy. In this latter regard the lines will blur between IT and other domains:

• is it IT or facilities management if IT systems are monitoring and managing smart power meters, smart bidirectional power grids and micro generation equipment?
• is it IT or facilities management if IT systems are monitoring and managing building heating and cooling and controlling heat capture and re-use systems?
• is it an IT issue if companies must adhere to very exacting emissions reporting requirements? This question makes more sense if you ask “How much money was spent on IT projects as a result of legislation designed to ensure accuracy and transparency in financial reporting?” .... otherwise expressed as “How much money flowed into IT budgets due to SOX?”

It is by no means certain that the established technology industry players have the answers, the means of execution, nor the depth of understanding to be the winners in the sustainability centred marketplace that lies ahead. Though if history is a guide they may well eventually buy a way into it. Meanwhile many of tomorrow’s industry winners are waiting for their moment in the spotlight. If you, as a vendor, believe you have the answers, the expertise, and the capability to be tomorrow’s winner we at Quocirca want to hear from you. Expect to be asked some tough questions—it takes some serious effort to become a winner of the future.

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By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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Sunday 7 September 2008, will mark the 10th anniversary of the incorporation of Google Inc (not to be confused with the registration of the http://www.google.com/ domain 11 years ago in September 1997). In those 10 years Google has created one of the world's most valuable brand names, become a verb and proved, during a period when many other online ventures failed, that a highly-profitable business can be created on the internet or, as it is often termed, in the cloud.

Google's success to date has been built largely around online advertising driven by internet search. As it looks to its next 10 years it wants to be seen as a strategic supplier to businesses as well as most people's favourite search engine. Will it succeed in this and what, if anything, has it done for business in its first 10 years?

Well quite a lot actually. Google's success in online search has ensured it is the main starting point for finding things and being found online and Google internet search has become a critical business tool, changing the way we research everything from purchasing plans to sales campaigns. This success has driven the online advertising model and changed the dynamics of the whole advertising industry. Having said that, this has all happened as a by-product of having a good search engine and business model, not a result of Google focusing on products and services for businesses per se.

Another way in which Google has transformed the way businesses view IT is that it is a major proof point for the effectiveness of software as a service (SaaS). A point constantly overlooked by both the critics and advocates of SaaS is that it is not a straight choice between on-demand and on-premise; most applications in the future will be a combination of both. Google Earth and Google Maps are used as online services to enrich both on-demand and on-premise applications.

All this said, Google would like to become a true challenger to Microsoft in supplying office tools to businesses of all sizes. It still has some way to go. Take up for its on-premise enterprise search appliance (for businesses to search their own data) has been limited and Google Apps (email, word processor, spreadsheet and so on) are yet to be widely adopted by businesses. Furthermore, the majority of Google's revenue is made up cent-by-cent from clicks on adverts, driven by online search. In other words Google Apps and other more non-core ventures are subsidised.

So, while another challenge (alongside Open Office) to Microsoft's domination of the office tools market is welcome, Google's success is by no means guaranteed. The current economic downturn or a change in the dynamics of the online advertising market could leave a dent in Google's revenue.

That change could happen sooner than Google would like. The majority of the adverts that Google sells are viewed using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). The next version, IE8, due for release later this year, allows users to mask their identity—so-called "porn mode". If internet surfers start using this option for whatever reason, it will drive some of the value out of Google search, as it will no longer be able to target advertising based on users' search history.

Any of this could make it harder for Google to subsidise its non-core activities. Furthermore, businesses are still largely sticking with Microsoft Office, suspicious of relying on tools that are only available online and storing all their content off-site. This suspicion may be misplaced; for many their content might be safer with Google than on their own laptops and servers, but Google recognises this as a real problem so has recently introduced Google Gears allowing off-line use of Google Apps and other tools.

Microsoft sees Google as one of its main competitors in the next few years, but this is more about Microsoft's effort to get into cloud computing itself rather than a perceived threat to its core business offerings. No one has ever accused Microsoft of running its Office or indeed Windows businesses at a loss. The fight is about who is one of the biggest overall names in the world of IT and for day-to-day business use Microsoft retains its lead over Google and is not going to readily cede any of its core strengths as a supplier to businesses to the 10-year old upstart.

This content was first published by computing.co.uk in Quocirca's big picture blog - http://quocirca.computing.co.uk/

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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For those of you with any familiarity with bridge, you will know that at a higher level, the game is replete with conventional bids (that is, your bid means something specific that is not necessarily related to the suit you bid in). One such convention is called Lebensohl. There are also variations on this convention such as Modified Lebensohl, Lebensohl with transfers, Staymansohl, Extended Lebensohl, and Rubensohl. Finally, somebody came up with YAS, which is the acronym for ‘yet another Sohl'. Well, I am about at that stage with data warehouses so I have coined the acronym YAWN: ‘yet another warehousing notion'. I'd like to think of a better word than notion (I would welcome suggestions) but yawn encapsulates my feelings so well that it seems appropriate.

Anyway, as an update in the YAWN wars, a number of things have caught my attention recently, not least a number of new (or new to me) vendors, a couple of lawsuits, and two companies announcing support for MapReduce.

As far as the companies go, these are:

• Aster Data, whose nCluster is a shared-nothing, row-based, clustered solution;
• InfoBright, which offers the column-based Brighthouse;
• InfoBionics, which describes its product as being a cellular database management system and which I would describe as using a hybrid associative/tokenised approach (incidentally, I would describe illuminate's correlation database in the same way);
• 1010data, which is another column-based database but is rather more interesting both because it is provided through a SaaS offering and because the company has been around since 2000 and has a significant number of customers, many of which are major organisations—I will be writing in more detail about 1010data in a separate article.

The lawsuits I will merely mention—with DATAllegro and Vertica both being sued for patent infringements; in the case of Vertica, by Sybase.

Much more interesting are the announcements by both Greenplum and Aster Data that they are supporting MapReduce. I have to say that I have not fully got my head around MapReduce yet (any contributions that can explain it in words of one syllable would be welcome) but as I understand it, it is effectively a form of tokenisation. Its importance is that it makes it much easier to parallelise functions that are otherwise hard to parallelise. For example, you can parallelise text processing and mining and, potentially, you can use it to parallelise other things where that would be useful and where it is currently difficult.

I have seen suggestions that MapReduce could be usefully applied to data mining and analytics. I am not sure about this: isn't that what massively parallel processing does for you, let alone the various data mining products out there? I can see the advantages in text mining, where it may be difficult to break down the data into subsets but I am not clear how this would apply to data mining.

In any case, the verdict is not yet in on MapReduce—it has issues with SQL, for example. Whether it will become popular or stay a minority sport remains to be seen: if lots of other vendors start coming out with it then you will know that it is at least seen to be a requirement—if they don't then we will know that it isn't.

Anyway, so much for the latest update on the YAWN wars. Oh, and incidentally, a little bird tells me that Oracle may have something to say shortly.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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AbilityNet provides usability and accessibility testing for clients in the UK. The testing is carried out at their usability laboratory in City University. TechSmith Morae is used to record the testing sessions and keeps a record of the screen images, the keyboard and mouse interactions as well as a video of the user which captures the reactions of the user and any comments made.

To run the different tests AbilityNet need users with specific attributes; recently they were looking for keyboard only users. I prefer not to use the mouse and try and do as much as possible just using the keyboard, so I asked if I could be one of the testers. The fact that I research accessibility made me an unusual candidate but we were sure that the results would still be valuable.

The laboratory is made up of two rooms, the small one for the observers and a larger room for the user. The two rooms are connected by a one-way mirror. I sat in the bigger room with a moderator who described the tasks they wanted me to try on a new web site. The moderator sat to my right and slightly behind me so that I was not aware of her whilst I was using the computer.

I was asked to give a running commentary of what I saw on the screen and what I was doing to complete the allotted task. Every so often the moderator would ask a question to illicit more information such as 'What do you think of the layout of this screen?'; but she never offered any help on how to tackle the task.

The session lasted about an hour and was very relaxed. Even though it was relaxed a great deal of information was being collected by the observers with the help of Morae.

The results will be shown to the client and the developers and I hope will result in a better solution. Some of the problems identified during my session were:

• Language has to be as clear as possible, I did not take the shortest route in one task because the wording on a link was misleading.
• Large amounts of information on one page can be confusing, especially if it cannot all be seen on the screen at one time, and can make it difficult to find the relevant information.
• If the information also includes a large number of links (in one case there were 50+ links on a page) then getting to the right link is a nightmare for a keyboard only user. I often had to hit the tab key twenty times to get to the link I needed.
• Having to tab through the menus at the beginning of pages is tedious, on this site I had to tab ten times on each page before I got to the content and then I might have to tab another twenty to get to the relevant link.
• Skip nav links were implemented on some pages but they were not visible to the keyboard user. I managed to discover them and therefore reduced the amount of tabbing. Making them visible would be much better.
• Having discovered the skip nav on some pages it became apparent that it was not consistently on all pages. Inconsistency like that is bad and makes sites more difficult to use.
• For a keyboard user being able to see what element is in focus is essential (it is normally shown by a border of dots). Most of the time the focus was obvious and tabbing moved the focus in a predictable way. Unfortunately occasionally the dots were not clearly visible so it was difficult for me to know what was in focus. Worse still in some cases nothing visible was in focus at all, pressing the tab button a second time resolved the problem but it just left me confused.
• Some links created a new window. This seemed to happen for no logical reason and was a real surprise. For me it was a problem because the window was a different size and it is not easy to resize a window without using a mouse.
• One task was to fill in a simple form. This was easy: the drop downs were useful, the tabbing from one field to the next was in a logical order and the submit button worked. The only criticism of the form was that it was not clear what would happen next with the information.
• The final task was to find some information. I missed the obvious link because the wording was not clear so I tried the search facility. Good searches are great news for keyboard only users because they get the user to the right information with the minimum of clicks. Something was wrong with the search engine optimisation of the site because the correct page was not on the first page of hits. My suspicion was that the page title had not been set up correctly. Getting SEO right is important for accessibility.

That seems a good collection of issues from a one hour session and shows the power of usability laboratories. With TechSmith Morae all the evidence is immediately available and includes metrics such as time to complete a task and number of key depressions.

I already understood the benefits of usability testing but seeing it in action really confirmed the power for me.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 1st September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The news that IBM has joined the AIA significantly strengthens this important cross-vendor initiative.

About eight months ago, on December 10, 2007, a coalition of leading information technology (IT) and assistive technology (AT) companies announced the formation of the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA). An engineering working group dedicated to enabling developers to more easily create accessible software, hardware and Web products. These solutions will reduce barriers to information and communication technologies that currently exist for people with disabilities in today's digital world.

The founding companies included:

• Information Technology (IT) companies:
  • Adobe Systems
  • Bayfirst Solutions
  • Design Science, Inc.
  • HP
  • Microsoft
  • Novell
  • Oracle
• Assistive Technology (AT) companies:
  • Acapela Group
  • CAST
  • Claro Software
  • Dolphin Oceanic
  • Eyetech Digital Systems, Inc.
  • GW Micro
  • HiSoftware
  • Madentec
  • QualiLife
  • Serotek Corporation
  • TextHelp Systems

IBM was noticeably absent from this list so I was delighted to see the announcement, on August 4, 2008, that IBM has joined the Alliance and will sit on the executive committee. In the same announcement GW Micro, the developers of the screen reader Window-Eyes, also joined the executive committee. The executive committee is now made up of the accessibility heavyweights in the vendor community: Rob Sinclair from Microsoft, Andrew Kirkpatrick from Adobe, Richard Schwerdtfeger from IBM, Doug Geoffray from GW Micro and Claudio Giugliemma from Qualilife.

The best way to understand what the alliance will be involved in is to look at the four initial projects that the alliance will carry out (I have copied the project descriptions word-for-word and then added my comments in brackets):

User Interface (UI) Automation

This Working Group's charter is to conduct a cross-industry review of the UIA specification to clarify and document implementation Best Practices. The Working Group will define extensions to the specification to address new controls, content or interaction scenarios in applications or assistive technology products.

(The first announcement from the Alliance came in January 2008 when Microsoft announced that it had committed to contribute its User Interface Automation (UIA) specification to the AIA. This is related to an earlier announcement from Microsoft and Novell to enable cross-platform accessibility by implementing UI Automation on Linux to enable the exchange of accessibility information between Windows and Linux. The UIA specification describes Microsoft's latest accessibility framework technology, and will help developers include advanced accessibility functionality into implementations designed for use on the Windows or Linux operating systems. I understand that the continuing development of the UIA will now rest with this working group.)

Mapping WAI-ARIA to UI Automation

This Working Group's charter is to enhance support of these additional specifications.

(With the completion of WAI-ARIA expected later this year this group should be very busy ensuring the interpretation of the standard and the implementations are compatible and consistent across all the vendors.)

Interoperability of Accessibility APIs

This Working Group's charter is to align the semantics of the leading accessibility APIs in use in the industry today:

• Active Accessibility (MSAA);
• IAccessible2;
• UI Automation (UIA);
• ATK/AT-SPI; and
• OSX Accessibility Protocol

This alignment will facilitate high-quality mapping of information among these accessibility models.

(IBM was one of the major developers of IAccessible2 and hence the importance of IBM being a member of AIA).

Common Keyboard Shortcuts for AT Products Used with Web Browsers

This Working Group's charter is to:

• Engage with other industry efforts to define common keyboard shortcuts for web applications and web 2.0 controls.
• Prevent or manage keyboard shortcut conflicts and interoperability between browsers, web pages and ATs.
• Additional projects, as approved by the AIA Steering Committee, will follow.

Conclusion

The Alliance brings together system, application and AT vendors. The ability of these different vendors to discuss detailed interoperability issues and then to agree how to resolve should improve the usability and accessibility for all.

The addition of IBM and GW Micro to the executive committee should provide a major boost to the realisation of the Alliances admirable objectives.

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 29th August 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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This is the third in a series of articles I shall be producing based on a major piece of research being undertaken by Bloor Research on the BPMS market. My thanks go to Kevin Haugh, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, Brian Murray, Director of Solutions Marketing, and Rob Vignerot, Director of BPM Product Management for their recent briefing. Some of you may have read my short article in June 2008 (Metastorm released a new version of the BPM suite) on the new release when it was first announced. In this article I will flesh out this previous article based on the recent briefing.

For those readers who have not read anything I have written on Metastorm before I will give a short overview of the company and its product set. So who are Metastorm? Metastorm were founded in 1996 and have their corporate headquarters in Baltimore in the USA. They were one of the early developers of BPMS software. They have over 1200 customers with, like many BPMS vendors, a heavy number of financial services and government customers but, unusually, they also have a number of retail and manufacturing customers.

At the end of July 2007, Metastrorm acquired Proforma (Metastorm acquires Proforma Corp). This formed part of a new strategy for the company to tackle the gaps that they saw in their customers between Enterprise Architecture, Process Analysis and Process Execution. As part of the incorporation of the Proforma product, Metastorm started on the building of a SOA-inspired common meta-model and platform, called Metastorm Enterprise. The Metastorm Enterprise products portfolio consists of:

• Metastorm ProVision: Enterprise Modelling and Business Architecture which includes support for modelling of people, systems, processes, data, services, and critical interrelationships.
• Metastorm ProVision BPA: Business Process Analysis which includes process modelling, simulation, Six Sigma and other optimization methods.
• Metastorm Discovery: Business Process Discovery which provides understanding and analysis of current operations.
• Metastorm BPM: Business Process Management which provides support for including design, automation, analysis, and monitoring of both human and system-based processes.
• Metastorm Integration Manager: Process Integration which provides support legacy and mainframe process integration.

Enterprise 7.6 - BPM
Rob Vignerot described BPM v7.6 as all about enhancing the user experience. As a founding member of Microsoft Business Process Alliance, much of this is to exploit Microsoft's Office 2007 and, in particular, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which has been gaining many new users for Microsoft.

In addition to its traditional web client, Metastorm also offers a Metastorm Client for Office 2007 which provides the ability for users to use any of their Office desktop applications as a BPM client—complete with a Metastorm BPM ribbon bar. This latest edition of Metastorm's Microsoft Office client also contains a new feature, which Metastorm call "process binding"; this allows process data to be incorporated into documents, presentations, and spreadsheets and for business users to have the ability to generate pre-defined or ad hoc Metastorm reports in Excel 2007 format. This feature Vignerot also describes as a means of providing offline support by variables being bound to fields contained within a document or spreadsheet, which can then be opened offline. In fact, new instances of a process can even be created from new documents or spreadsheets that are based on templates using process binding.

In terms of working with MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0, Metastorm BPM 7.6 includes support for WebParts and Document Library integration. This latter feature supports the access and storing documents in a SharePoint Library from a Metastorm BPM process.

Metastorm's Notify gadget is a new feature for users who are using Vista. This gadget provides a To Do List or Watch List that can be monitored. A priority breakdown can be displayed and alerts for new items are shown. It is possible to run multiple gadgets at the same time.

Another piece of integration with the Microsoft infrastructure components is the ability to use Microsoft Workflow Foundation workflows as part of a BPM process. This is both a design time and run time feature which begins with hosting of the Workflow Foundation (WF) Composer by the Metastorm Process Orchestrator for WF. This gives process designers access to all WF activities along with a collection of Metastorm WF activity components including activities that authenticate, create process instances, take actions, manage content, and update task lists. The WF rules composer can be used to build libraries of re-usable business rules that combine process information with existing services and data. There is support for Visual Scripting via WF driven from the Process Orchestrator. At run time the Metastorm Process Engine is a highly scalable WF host. WF Workflows are "published" to the BPM repository. The Integration Wizard is used to call the "Workflows". The BPM Process Engine hosts the Workflow Foundation Engine and runs workflows at selected stages and actions.

The final piece of support for Microsoft infrastructure components in 7.6 is the ability to build customised BPM UI in Visual Studio using a new set of ASP.NET Web Parts. These new Web Parts give access to Services, ToDo Lists, Watch Lists, Custom Lists, Blank Form Lists, Admin Form Lists, and Dashboard Views.

The Metastorm BPM 7.6 release also sees the first major integration with the former Proforma products with the ability for a simulation model in ProVision to be generated from a model in the Metastorm Designer (process design component of Metastorm BPM). This facility is wizard driven and uses either estimated or historical simulation data.

How good are Metastorm's claims for their product set?

One of the things Bloor's research is looking at is the way vendors position themselves to their customers. Metastorm lists their 6 differentiators as:

• More than the basic BPM round trip—strategy to execution
• Unique integration to Microsoft applications
• Advanced integration and system based process support—as well as the traditional human-centric BPM
• Superior process intelligence capability and flexibility
• Product maturity and leadership
• Superior time to value and customer success

The acquisition of Proforma last year has allowed Metastorm to provide what at present is a unique state for an organisation to use an integrated product set to support both Enterprise Architecture and the capture of business strategies, and the ability to turn that into designed business processes that can be managed and monitored.

Certain of the new features in the latest release mean that at the time of writing Metastorm have developed some unique features (for example process binding) in the way they integrate to the Microsoft Office Suite. The test will be how long this is true and that their competitors will also generate other unique features, so that will leave the potential buyer in the position of assessing which of these features is more important to their situation.

In terms of integration, Metastorm backs this claim on it being faster and easier exploitation of legacy and mainframes. This is very difficult to evaluate as well as being a matter of opinion. All BPMS tools need to support this capability. It is really about the ease with which IT and business users can do this.

Metastorm backs the claim over process intelligence by referring to a native BI capability (via an OEM of Hyperion in Metastorm Insight) in addition to the support of a broad range of third-party BI/reporting tools. Whereas this is one way of looking at this issue, Bloor would see this as being more to do with what can you do with the process data collected by the monitoring capability. For instance, can users combine the process data with business data to view how many processes dealt with a particular insurance product in a given timeframe—particularly useful during promotions?

When I fed back to Metastorm that Bloor was not sure that this USP was proven, we got a response from Metastorm which provided more information on their capabilities. Sharon Hanger, Metastorm's Director, Market Strategy and Analyst Relations responded, "Metastorm Insight provides the facility to combine the business data consumed or produced by the process or other data within the enterprise with process metrics to provide process intelligence." The Metastorm BPM process data is stored in an open documented schema and is available to be queried by other tools. This allows customers to develop reports with their existing reporting infrastructures or the data can be used in other tools.

What this means is that Metastorm are able to offer real "process intelligence" capabilities, although it would appear from the information supplied that currently this only worked from the Metastorm side and Bloor would see complete process intelligence meaning that the BAM data collected by Metastorm could be interrogated externally by BI tools—i.e. our view of true process intelligence is that queries link BAM and BI data can come from either side. Hanger added that "Metastorm BPM can integrate with other BI tools. The schema is open and accessible to be queried outside the tool."

In terms of product maturity and leadership, with over 1200 customers and a thriving partner network put into the melting pot with Metastorm's vision of going back up the chain to business strategy and their current closeness to Microsoft, we give them a big tick here.

Superior time to value is another one of these measures which is in the eye of the user and therefore difficult to assess without actually doing a project involving the toolset. Metastorm's product set is on route to being completely unified (see review comments on 7.6 above), but the tools themselves are mature with therefore a lot of experience in how best to use them around. Metastorm have provided a series of what they call "Accelerators", which include process pods and templates. In addition, like many BPMS vendors they have developed a rapid implementation methodology to speed implementation. The company also has over 80 documented, customer-approved success stories and over 25 customer video testimonials on its website.

Conclusions
Metastorm BPM v7.6 provides some really good usability features that exploit Microsoft Office Suite 2007. Not only does this mean that current and potential users of Metastorm who are Office users can see immediate benefits, but for Metastorm they are using Microsoft infrastructure components which means that they don't have to develop their own—makes good sense to exploit the platform that you are built upon.

In terms of Metastorm's USP, in the main one Bloor sees is that they stand up to the mark, but certain ones are about perception and therefore hard to verify. However Bloor's overall feel about Metastorm is that they are well placed for the next stage of BPMS development and use.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 29th August 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The US retailer Target has agreed to pay USD 6 million in damages to plaintiffs in California who are unable to use Target's website because it cannot be accessed using a screen-reader.

I first wrote about this case nearly two years ago 'Retailers need to become more accessible on-line' and again last October 'Three cheers for Target for fighting accessibility'.

I hate to say I told you so but in this case my predictions were correct:

• Target have had to pay damages. USD 6 million is not an insignificant amount off the bottom line during a down turn in the economy.
• Plus the legal expenses on both sides. Two years of attorneys fees must be significant. Unless Target are going to sue the attorneys for bad legal advice.
• Plus the direct and indirect costs of executive time which could have been better spent improving the profitability of the corporation.
• Plus the reputational loss of the executive team who made the decision to fight rather than cry 'mea culpa' and fix the problem.
• Plus the reputational loss of the company from bad publicity and lack of social responsibility.
• Plus the cost of fixing the website and being shown to have fixed it. Target have agreed to work in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to make the site more accessible by the end of February 2009. Six months is an aggressive time-scale and that will add to the cost compared to a phased improvement starting two years ago.
• Plus the loss of business benefits over the last two years that could have accrued to Target as they did to Legal and General (see Massive business case for accessibility) and there is a similar story relating to Tesco.

All of this just reconfirms what I said in my previous article:

'The messages to all e-commerce sites owners should now be clear:

• The laws on accessibility apply to your site.
• You would be brave, or more correctly foolhardy, to try and claim some special exemption, as you are likely to fail.
• The law is now clear and public so the courts will not be sympathetic to the plea 'I did not think it applied to my site' or even worse 'I did not know about the law'.

So how should e-commerce owners react?:

• Do not panic.
• Recognise that the principles apply to you even if you are not based, or market, in the US because most other jurisdictions now have relevant laws in this area
• Arrange an initial assessment of your sites to understand the size and scope of any problems. It is possible they may be small.
• Increase your awareness of accessibility and the related usability benefits. One simple way is to read my previous, and future, articles and blogs.
• Build accessibility into your requirements definition process.
• Create a realistic plan to move towards accessibility.

If you are seen to be actively working on accessibility neither the courts nor the accessibility advocates will wish to take action against you. They understand that moving to accessibility takes time and must be done in a cost effective and realistic fashion. They also recognise that there are other enterprises that they should chase as they are still not taking the issue seriously and need to be prodded to conform.

Since this case began the understanding of website accessibility has moved forward considerably. Creating accessible websites is now not difficult as long as it is built into the whole development cycle from initial inception through design, build, test, implementation and production. A good guide to this process is provided by PAS 78.

There are now no excuses just build a plan and do it.

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 28th August 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Just picked up this from an article in the RFID Journal on August 26th 2008. Mary Catherine O'Connor reported that nearly two years after it issued a RFI to Active RFID equipment vendors that operated at 433.92 MHz and are compliant with the ISO 18000-7 standard, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has issued a RFP for the technology. Vendors have until September 3rd to respond. I have paraphrased the article to highlight to those of you who might have missed the article the main points covered in the RFP. If you want to read the whole article then go to http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/4280/.

The winning vendors will be able to sell products and services to the DOD under a three-year contract, dubbed RFID III. Language used in the RFP, however, suggests the contract could be utilised by any government agency. According to the documentation, there is a maximum dollar amount of $428,664,432.00 allowable for the total of all contracts awarded against the RFP.

Vendors will need to offer five separate tag types to meet the RFP requirements. These tags range from a simple battery-powered license-plate type of identifier to a tag used for container security, and must support five sensors used to track light, temperature, humidity, shock and tampering. To create active RFID systems that comply with the department's requirements, vendors that plan to submit proposals for the RFID III contract first have to license intellectual property from Savi, since that company holds IP essential to meeting the ISO 18000-7 standard.

According to the RFP's Solicitation Provisions section, it is anticipated that a maximum of three vendors will be chosen. This section states that "contract awards will be based on the best overall (i.e., best value) proposals that are determined to be the most beneficial to the Government, with appropriate consideration given to the five evaluation factors: Technical, Management Support Plan, Performance Risk, Price and Small Business Participation." The vendor with the lowest price, the document indicates, may not necessarily win.

The RFP notes that the contract awards are expected to be made no later than four weeks after the close of the RFP, which is currently slated for September 3rd. Vendors chosen may then need to provide oral presentations and/or a demonstration of their proposals.

Will this have an effect on the world RFID market? My feelings is that at the moment, RFID has passed from a technology discussion and sale to the higher level of a business solutions. The companies who are making money from RFID are the ones offering solutions to business problems. This US DOD RFP seems very technical, so I am not sure that it will have as great effect as the previous RFPs. Anyone got a different view? I would be interested to hear from you.

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By: Fran Howarth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 28th August 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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According to the old cliché, content is king. For many organisations today, the content that they produce could be considered as the crown jewels of the business, including highly sensitive and valuable data such as financial records, intellectual property and databases of customer records. There are many that would like to get their hands on those gems of information and preventing this data from leaking out of an organisation is of prime concern to governments, enterprises and small businesses alike.

But it is not just data leakage that organisations today fear. Most entities face some kind of regulation and many of those rules mandate that information produced by or received by the organisation, such as in the form of emails, must be kept for a specified period of time and that its integrity must remain intact. For example, by placing controls on who can access what information and what they can do with it so that records cannot be altered by an unauthorised person.

Most of those regulations mandate that all information must be recoverable so that it can be handed over to authorities should there be suspicions of non-compliance or illegal activity. And this is also occurring in private cases as well. Electronic discovery (e-discovery) lawsuits are now fairly commonplace in the US and are growing in importance in Europe, particularly in the UK. This means that organisations must be able to produce any documentation that could be relevant to the lawsuit—and in any format, from word processing documents and emails, to product designs on CAD-CAM systems.

An organisation that has taken steps to secure and effectively govern its information may think that it can prevent its information gems, or even dregs, such as derogatory comments made by an employee, from falling into the wrong hands. Or they may think that they are in a good position to answer regulatory or e-discovery demands with the minimum of fuss.

However, there is one common mistake that has scuppered a fair few organisations to date, but which is only just beginning to get the attention that it deserves. That is the failure to consider metadata. Metadata is defined as "data that provides information about other data". This can include information about who created a document and when, and who has made what modifications to it at which point. Essentially it is the digital fingerprint or DNA that identifies all activity related to a document and provides an audit trail of that activity.

Lawsuits demanding the production of metadata along with the documents to which they refer have been brought to court since the mid-1990s and are becoming increasingly common. High profile cases where metadata has been used to provide key evidence include WorldCom, Enron and the Martha Stewart investigations, mainly in the form of emails. In some cases, metadata has been used to reconstruct evidence in disputes over timelines, such as an accusation that someone has backdated documents.

Other gaffes involving metadata have included a report released by the UK Prime Minister's office regarding its contentions that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction. Used by Colin Powell to make the case for war in an address to the United Nations, a search for metadata in the document revealed that parts of it had been copied from work produced the previous year by a graduate student. And pharmaceutical giant Merck suffered embarrassment when metadata revealed that it had deleted a story about the causal relationship between its drug Vioxx and heart attacks.

Although the problems with metadata have long been known about by technologists, today's highly regulated environment and the sensitive nature of much of the information produced by organisations are elevating the issue to the business level. Now more than ever there is a need for organisations to ensure that they have systems in place to control the information that they hold—including metadata that can be used to prove when documents were created, stored, searched and retrieved. In practice, the best defence is a layered strategy, including employee education, technology tools such as metadata cleaning or mining software, and policies defining the responsibilities of staff when handling documents.

For those organisations that have such processes in place, the benefits that they reap may be more than just the avoidance of negative publicity or a large fine. Although less publicised, there are cases where organisations have been able to use metadata attached to business documents to prove that an allegation was false. For example, in one case, an organisation in the UK faced a lawsuit from another firm which claimed that it had certain information at its disposal. Through forensic investigation, however, the organisation facing the lawsuit was able to prove through examination of metadata, including that attached to previously deleted documents, that it had never been party to that information and thus it won its day in court.

Just as fingerprints left at a scene of a crime are regularly used to secure convictions or to prove that a person could not have been there, the digital DNA of documents, or metadata, can be used as evidence of wrongdoing or can be used to prove innocence. The importance of metadata cannot be understated and should be a key consideration in the development of an effective system of information governance.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 27th August 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The major users of early versions of speech recognition technology where people who could not use a keyboard. Even though it was slow and made mistakes it was a boon to the user as they could, with a little patience, produce high quality written communications.

Now, the technology can reliably transcribe at 120 words per minute. This compares very well with the average user who struggles to type 40 words per minute accurately. So it is no surprise that many users including lawyers, doctors and court reporters are using the technology. The widening of the potential user base has encouraged Nuance to invest in continuous improvements in the basic voice recognition engine as well as the functionality of the user interface. This investment has brought benefits to the original group of users who have no other viable input method.

Here are some of the new features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) that will help users who have limited or no use of the keyboard or mouse and are voice-only users.

Shortcuts

"Send email to Peter Abrahams and Steve Chambers,": Dragon opens the user's email program, creates a new email and puts the appropriate contact names into the "to:" box.

"Search maps for Italian restaurants in Boston, Massachusetts," or "Search the Web for Bloor article on DNS": Dragon opens the default search engine and Web browser to enter the spoken words in the search field and return the results. Users can also search specific sites by voice including Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Wikipedia and YouTube.

In previous versions, navigating to the correct window and input field would have required several spoken commands; users who could use a mouse tended to use it instead of voice commands. The shortcuts will greatly enhance the experience of voice-only users.

Quick Voice Formatting

Quick Voice Formatting commands allow users to issue a single voice command, such as "Bold Quick Voice Formatting," to make formatting text faster than ever. Or, to use Word styles say "set style header 2". In addition, an extensive set of natural language commands means users don't have to memorize complex instructions. In Microsoft Word, for example, a user can say ‘make that bigger,' and the font size increases instantly.

Again this is faster than previous version when at least two voice commands would be necessary.

Bluetooth headset

A special DNS 10 edition is bundled with a Bluetooth headset allowing users to move further from the workstation whilst continuing to dictate. This will be a boon to users who are unable to put on a headset unaided as they will be able to leave their workstation and return without needing to ask for help.

Digital voice recorders

DNS 10 can transcribe dictation from voice recorders and PDAs; this enables a user to record notes anywhere and then upload them to their workstation.

More Flexible Enrolment for younger speakers and users with certain speech challenges

Self-paced reading is available for speakers who have difficulty with the existing interactive text passages. This makes it easier for younger users and users with certain speech challenges to train the product to understand their voice.

Some medical conditions that make it difficult to use a keyboard also affect the user's speech. This new enrolment process should ensure that more users who need voice recognition software can train it efficiently.

Better control of commands versus dictation on the web

In previous version it was sometimes difficult to ensure that DNS could distinguish between a word such as 'click' being used in dictation or as a command. DNS 10 provides various options to reduce this confusion. This should remove some frustration felt by voice-only users.

Section 508

DNS 10 is fully certified for Section 508 ensuring that all functions can be used without the need to use a keyboard or mouse. This is essential for voice-only users.

Data collection

Nuance is keen to continue to improve its product and to do this it needs to understand how it is used in real life environments. The user is asked if they would be willing to participate in a program to collect this data.

Conclusion

There are further new features in DNS 10 but I have picked out those that have a direct benefit to users who cannot use the keyboard. These features will make it easier and faster for them to work and play on their workstation.

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By: Dr Dave Waddington, Senior VP and Head of Research, The Information Difference Posted: 21st August 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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Earlier this year (BI: The Inconvenient Truth) I drew attention to the mounting frustration within the business community focused squarely on business intelligence (BI). Organizations the world over have invested significant amounts of time, effort and money in BI. While they have in part seen the value that successful adoption of BI tools and techniques can bring them, this is the tip of the iceberg. There is growing frustration that they have not realized the full potential of these investments. A consequence is that companies have masses of information they don’t have confidence in and are unable to analyze to deliver the key performance management information they desperately need now and in the future.

Web 2.0 has shown the world at large the benefits of collaboration, social networking, utilizing collective intelligence and user self service with revolutionary products such as MySpace™, Wikipedia™, Facebook™ and LinkedIn™.

Leveraging, for example, sales and marketing data within a company to derive performance management information is a highly collaborative process, yet few current BI tools effectively support this. The next generation of BI tools will need to embrace Web 2.0 to bring to BI just these collaborative and social networking features that have proved so effective elsewhere.

Enter Antivia. Ex-Business Objects employees Mark Sands and Mark Hudson founded Antivia in 2007 with offices in Australia and the United Kingdom. Their mission; to utilize the power of Web 2.0 technologies to deliver content and capability to a business community of collaborative users in more interesting and intuitive ways. Their flagship products Antivia Desktop and Scenario, first released in October 2007, herald the next generation of BI tools.

Desktop is the framework on which their range of second-generation BI solutions is being built. It takes full advantage of a company's existing BusinessObjects™ (supporting WebIntelligence, Crystal reports, Desktop Intelligence and Xcelsius) BI investment by delivering functionality to enable users to enjoy the benefits of next generation web in today’s business intelligence environment. It extends traditional BI functionality with community forums, the ability to rate and tag reports, to designate reports as ‘hot’ (or not), to have ‘my favorites’, to initiate and manage community polls and much more.

The rating features help users across your business community to instantly see which reports might be most useful and relevant to them. Desktop also automatically assigns ‘hot’ reports based on the user ratings and viewing patterns. Anyone can become a member of the community so it will spread BI virally throughout a business thus improving and encouraging participation and collaboration across functional and geographic boundaries. Making use of users everyday activities to both improve the system and lower the overall administration cost.

Scenario is even more innovative since it harnesses the power of BusinessObjects XI and extends this to allow users to:

• Manage the information hierarchies within their reports.
• Manipulate hierarchies and instantly see changes on reports.
• Save hierarchies and re-apply them at any time to newer versions of documents.
• Share hierarchy ideas with other users in their community.
• Keep track of changes to hierarchies over time.

The current hierarchy manipulation functionality based on ‘drag and drop’ with audit tracking is impressive but plans are at an advanced stage to extend this to cross dimensions. This brings a whole new power to business users enabling them to analyze and explore data in a way that hitherto always required intervention by IT.

Antivia has embraced many of the usage paradigms pioneered by e.g: Facebook and MySpace to make the user experience really intuitive. Anyone with experience of using one of these tools will make the transition to Antivia tools without blinking an eyelid.

This powerful and intuitive tool would make the ideal ‘front end’ for many master data management tools currently on the market.

But this is only the start. Given the history of its founders Antivia initially focused on delivering their innovative functionality on top of the BusinessObjects platform. They now also support Microsoft Reporting Services and plans are already advanced to extend to other BI platforms. The underlying modular architecture of the Antivia platform has been built to make it easy to link up to other BI tools. Next releases of Desktop and Scenario are due to appear soon bringing the ability to link BI style reports with Office documents and the like.

Of course all the usual caveats apply. Antivia is a relatively young company and has yet to gain momentum but to someone coming from a business background its clear that it is meeting a real business need.

Any organization using BI products today, and BusinessObjects in particular, should take a serious look at Antivia. Desktop and Scenario likely provide the functionality you have long sought after atop your BI environment.

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 20th August 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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After years of being slow to change, the construction industry has finally started to appreciate the importance of information technology as a tool in the construction process. This is not only at HQ but also on site. The industry is built upon a hierarchical model of architect, consultant, contractors and subcontractors all engaging in the project, therefore the importance of sharing information is key to the successful management of a tender, a project or even a supply chain process. Therefore anything that technology can do to provide a means of collaborating between people in the same company, customers and suppliers is very positive and welcome.

Union Square Software was formed in 2000 to develop and implement knowledge management, collaboration and enterprise portal solutions for the construction industry. Union Square is privately funded and has its headquarters in Nottingham, UK. Although the company is niche with 40 employees, they have 110 customers with circa 30,000 users. Most of the customers are headquartered in the UK or Ireland, but the product, Workspace, is used in 15 countries worldwide. Customers include Grimshaw Architects, Benoy, Osbornes, Midas, Fitzpatrick, Severn Trent Water and Tesco Building Services.

So what is Workspace? Stuart Bell, Sector Manager for Professional Services companies within Union Square Software, explained to Bloor Research that, "Workspace is an Enterprise Portal solution to support the communication and management of information across the business. It is a solution for project, email, document, customer and supplier information management. Workspace provides a consolidation point for disparate systems and data."

Workspace has been written to run on the Microsoft Windows .NET platform. The internal file store is a native file format. Microsoft SQL Server is used as the DBMS utilising Microsoft Indexing Services to catalogue all electronic documents published into the system. Whilst the application is typically installed on a client's technical infrastructure, the end user experience is fully browser-based supporting access to the system from anywhere with Internet connectivity.

Workspace consists of 4 key components:

• Corporate Database: used to provide a single source for Organisations, Contacts, Projects, Enquiries, Bids, Assets and Properties.
• Document Management: provides the ability to capture, store and retrieve documents/drawings/email as the product has been developed especially for the construction industry and has special features to support transmittals, drawings and scanning of wide format documents.
• Intranet/Extranet: no matter who created it or when, you go to the same place to find it. Workspace is also used as an Extranet, which enables mobile workforce support as well as allowing organisations to share documents with their external project and business stakeholders.
• Development Platform: this is based on Microsoft technology and forms an extension to Microsoft's Visual Studio package through an integral developer toolkit.

Workspace supports a number of key corporate and project processes:

• Project and Enquiry Management: provides a central point to manage the whole of the feasibility/tendering process for a project. All the information to the tender is related together and is seamlessly linked to the project at contract award. A series of job running and project management options are available to deliver further operational controls.
• Customer Relationship Management: provides a central point for the whole organisation to store information relating to the organisations and people a business knows and works with. Additionally Workspace captures specialist contact information required by the business, such as marketing interests.
• Email Management: Workspace works with Microsoft Outlook to store and manage emails. The stored textual content of mail messages and their attachments are indexed and are fully searchable. Incoming email is stored via drag and drop within Outlook using a dynamic IMAP service that automatically builds a list of the records the user is associated with or interested in. Sent mail can be stored directly into the system from Outlook using LDAP to lookup the project address or directly within Workspace in which case the message can be automatically captured.
• Document Management: this is a fundamental part of the core Workspace system that is used by every Workspace user to create, store and search for every document either created within the business or received by the business. It provides one place to go to see the full history of documentation concerning contacts, enquiries, projects or organisations.

There are some really neat features in Workspace that make it a very user-friendly and industry-aware tool. For instance, the security model is role-based, as one would expect from any Microsoft ISV, but then Union Square Software have exploited this to make the landing page be role based for all users. This customisation for users is taken further with the concept of "Personal Zones"; here users can choose the most appropriate applications to be included for them. The tabs on the windows (referred to as Band Sets), are used in the configuration for customers to display and secure pertinent information. The Information Zone exposes all of the corporate information archive (documents, drawings and email) in a familiar Windows and 'Google-like' search area with advanced filters to heighten results for required documentation. In the Activity Zone, all of the modules and options a person can access are logically displayed.

Workspace's corporate database is delivered with 5 key entities as standard: organisation, contract, projects, customers and assets but this data model is extensible. Workspace has support for mobile applications including 3G and specially written interface for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.

Union Square Software Workspace has a number of well-known competitors that include Microsoft SharePoint Server, Documentum and Automony. However they have built a good user base in their current niche of construction. In Bloor's view Workspace is also a good tool to consider for other project based industries.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 19th August 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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The data quality market is a surprisingly fragmented one for a market that is far from new and trendy. While there are a few leading vendors, there is no dominant one, and I have identified over 60 software vendors selling data quality software. I think there are a couple of reasons why the market has not grown more than it has. One is that many (by no means all) data quality vendors focus on providing a tool with a clever algorithm for, say, matching records or cleaning up name and address lists, yet pay little attention to supporting the governance processes that lie behind the causes of the poor data quality in the first place.

As well as measuring the state of existing data and fixing up errors, it is important to also understand the business processes that support the lifecycle of that data, from its creation, update and even retirement. The reason for poor data quality may lie in unclear roles and responsibilities, duplicate or conflicting processes in different departments. There may be a lack of understanding by one set of business users as to why certain data attributes need to be recorded (perhaps for the benefit of another part of the business). Data quality projects need to address these process issues if data quality is to be improved structurally, rather than being just a one-off fix.

Another issue is that many data quality tools specialise in dealing with very specific data to the neglect of others. The obvious example is customer name and address, but other vendors specialise in dealing with, say, product data or spares data, but little else. While there is certainly value in fixing up data of one type, the business as a whole may get more benefit from tackling a broader base of data, for example dealing not just with product data but the locations that these products are delivered to, and the customers they are supplied to. By tracing the lifecycle of data and mapping this to business processes, issues may be highlighted which cause data quality problems. In the absence of vendor attention, systems integrators are filling the void.

An example of this is Chicago-based Utopia, who, though only founded in 2002, have built up a fast growing business specialising in data lifecycle management solutions and consultancy services, especially in the process manufacturing and consumer products industries. They have combined a deep understanding of data with a vendor-agnostic approach.

The company has also created libraries of useful data-related tools, including data governance management facilities, which they use to integrate broader data lifecycle applications utilising specialised data quality and master data management products. With 160 staff and 50% revenue growth last year, Utopia is prospering in a way that few data quality vendors are. Many data quality vendors could learn some lessons from this and consider how to broaden their offerings to encompass support for a wide variety of data types, and also support the business processes that surround this data.

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