By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 5th December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Having set out my stall with regard to conventional data cleansing and matching products (a report card that would read "tries hard, could do better") I now want to turn my attention to data profiling. These sorts of tools do two things. First, they analyse the data for errors and, second they analyse the data to discover the relationships that exist between different data elements.

In so far as the analysis of data for errors (null fields, default fields, data not matching the defined datatype and so on) is concerned, most products do a pretty good job and, from a functional point of view (that is, not including considerations such as ease of use) are much of a muchness. On the other hand, where I think they may be a significant difference between products is in their ability to discover relationships. However, I will not comment on this now as I am conducting research into this issue and plan to publish a detailed report in the New Year.

Where I will comment is on the importance of understanding relationships not just between data elements but also between data and applications and even between data and the business.

Understanding data relationships is arguably the most important factor whenever you are moving and transforming data, especially in data migration and data archiving environments but also for moving data into a warehouse and similar applications. The reason for this is easy to see if you consider the effects of a broken relationship: orphaned customers with no orders aren't going to make your application software work well. It would be nice if you could see these relationships (which effectively comprise business entities) represented graphically.

Unfortunately, discovering relationships is not just about profiling your database. There may be relationships that exist across data sources (and types of data source) that you need to understand; and then there is the application factor. While it may not be theoretically correct from a purist data management perspective the fact is that many data relationships are defined within applications so, in one way or another, you really need to discover these.

Moreover, data-application relationships don't just have implications when you are moving data. For example, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where valid data for one application is invalid for another. A typical case might be where one application required a five digit numeric field and another application requires the same five numbers plus an additional two alphabetic characters. So, here's a question for data quality vendors: can your software tell the difference? It would also be nice to know how often different applications address the same data because then you would know how important the issue was.

Data relationships don't end with data and applications. It would be useful to understand, for example, who owns the data and who is a stakeholder. If you know what applications access data you may be able to infer the latter but does customer service history, for example, belong with CRM data or is it owned by the service department? You probably can't determine this automatically but you would certainly like to record it for data governance purposes.

And finally, relationships are not just important for IT but also for the business. As we have noted, a set of relationships effectively defines a business entity and these are the domain of data stewards and business analysts as much as they are of IT, so these should be capable of being presented in a business-friendly manner.

Now, I know of tools that do every one of things just outlined. Unfortunately, they are provided by disparate vendors with a variety of products, a number of which would not even be categorised as data profiling tools. During my current research I am hoping to hear that suppliers are expanding their capabilities into the areas just discussed but I expect I am destined to be disappointed, in which case a multi-tool approach may be required: I'll let you know.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 4th December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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There are hundreds of millions of PDF documents on the web. It is such a popular format because it can be viewed on most devices that attach to the web and because it looks the same on any of these devices. The producer of the document can be sure that what the reader sees is the same as that which was created. The documents contain a great deal of useful, interesting and important information, much of which is not available on-line in any other format. This information will be of interest to people with disabilities.

Adobe recognised in 2001 that the information in PDF files needed to be accessible by people with disabilities and extended the format with a set of tags that provided information that would make the files accessible to Assistive Technologies, such as screen-readers. However, as we approach 2009 most of the PDF files on the web are still not accessible. The reasons for this include:

• The producers are not aware that it is possible to create accessible PDF.
• The producers are not aware of the benefits of creating accessible PDF.
• Older PDF documents were created before 2001.
• Some authoring tools cannot produce accessible PDF directly.
• Other authoring tools can produce accessible PDF but it is not the default and the process is not simple.
• Tools for testing documents for accessibility and providing remediation have been very low-level technical tools. They could only be used by specialists with significant time available. They have not been usable by the majority of authors.

In 2008 a variety of authoring tools improved their ability to produce PDFs tagged for accessibility. However few of them get it absolutely right and there is therefore a need to test and then touch-up the document. Other tools do not produce tagged files and of course there are a vast number of existing files that are not tagged.

There is therefore a need for a tool to test PDF files to see if they are accessible and a related remediation tool to fix any issues. Adobe provides these functions as part of Acrobat. However there are two limitations to this support:

• There is a disclaimer on the testing tool that says: 'The Accessibility Checker can help you identify areas of your documents that may be in conflict with Adobe's interpretations of the referenced guidelines. However, the Accessibility Checker does not check all accessibility guidelines and criteria, including those in such referenced guidelines, and Adobe does not warrant that your documents will comply with any specific guidelines or regulations.'
• The remediation tools are editors that enable changes to be made to the internal structures of the documents including tags and content. These editors enable any required changes to be made; but they require a high level of skill, understanding, patience and time to create a fully accessible document. I believe that most document producers will struggle to make anything but minor changes using these tools.

NetCentric is a Canadian firm specialising in document compliance and has gained considerable experience providing consultancy and services to convert PDF documents into accessible PDF documents. Based on this experience they have developed CommonLook for Adobe Acrobat, a plug-in to Adobe Acrobat, which provides a more comprehensive testing tool and a higher-level interface for remediation.

The tools work on tagged documents so if the document is not tagged then Acrobat is used to add an initial set of tags.

The Logical Structure Editor is the main remediation tool. It is divided into two panes, one showing the source document and the other showing a simplified internal format. By outlining an area of the source the equivalent area of the internal format is highlighted. The highlighted area can then be tagged or dragged to its correct logical position.

On complex page layouts, for example one with multiple columns where headings and images cross multiple columns, Acrobat is not always capable of ascertaining the correct reading order. The logical structure editor allows the page to marked up with the correct order. It will bring together sections of text that Acrobat assumed were in separate columns, or divide a section of text into more than one column where Acrobat assumed that the text read straight across the page. Trying to fix this type of reading order error without CommonLook is very difficult and prone to error.

The Logical Structure Editor also has functions to create and modify tables. Once a table is created, areas of text can be highlighted and dragged into the correct cell. Again this is a task that can only been done by a highly trained expert using Acrobat by itself.

The editor includes a tool to automatically correct common errors such as the last word on one line being concatenated with the first word of the next line. These errors are often difficult to spot by hand and are very tedious to correct.

The Testing Tool is based around the Section 508 checklist. It provides automated checks where that is possible and identifies areas of the document that require some human checking. For example for each image it will show the image and the alternate text for the figure and ask the tester to confirm that the text is correct (pass), or not (fail). The tester can update the text at this point so that it will pass or add a comment as to why it failed. Tests include one to check if the document is readable by a person with colour-blindness.

When the test is complete CommonLook creates a report showing all the tests carried out on the document and the status. The report can be used as proof that testing is complete or handed back to the author to deal with the areas of failure.

To be able to use CommonLook effectively requires some training. After about an hour I began to feel fairly confident and some further clarification of detailed issues will make me fully proficient. Testing and remediation using CommonLook can still be time consuming, as each section of the document needs to be checked; however it is much faster, less prone to errors, and requires less skill than using Acrobat by itself.

I would recommend any organisation that creates significant numbers of PDF documents to incorporate CommonLook for Adobe Acrobat into the publication process.

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By: Martin Banks, Practice Leader - Datacentre & Mainframe, Bloor Research Posted: 4th December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The words 'software' and 'components' are being put together with increasing regularity these days, but the combination is already starting to look limited and restricting. The combination that now seems to sum up the trend more accurately brings together the words 'software' and 'industrialisation'.

The recent announcement By Fujitsu-Siemens of its Infrastructure as a Service included an update of FlexFrame, with an SAP-specific implementation marking the start of what is expected to be a growing range of application-specific implementations of the technology. FlexFrame provides what is, in effect, a container for the core code of an application like SAP, together with the specifics of the implementation that tailor that code to a specific set of business tasks. This creates an environment in which that specific implementation can be replicated and re-used within the Infrastructure as a Service.

Many users are going to fit a business model where multiple implementations of the same application will be required around different operating divisions, regional offices and the rest of that panoply of geographic options that are the stock in trade of the big global businesses. This way, they will get the opportunity to develop the application once and then re-use it, quite often with only minor localising adaptations, around the rest of the business.

Given the costs associated with implementing even a single instance of such applications, the potential for cutting implementation costs while at the same time speeding up the delivery process is a capability that must be worthy of closer inspection by potential users. And the fact is we can be sure that other popular applications will be the target for FlexFraming in the near future.

This does have the potential to be the start-point of a new industrialisation movement. This is not just die-stamping the few hundred lines of specialist code that make up a software component; it is not even the die stamping of a large applications package. This is getting close to die-stamping a complete, tailored implementation of a finished applications solution. Because of the savings in hand-crafting specific implementations—which is still often the case for different offices or divisions within the same global business—what seems at first like over-kill ends up making economic sense for users.

But this will interest not just users, however. There are many specialist integrators that have built businesses around these major applications, and the possibility of industrialising the integration process is likely to be seen as a two-edged sword. On the one hand it will allow them to package much of their implementation technologies and Intellectual Property. That could allow them the opportunity to develop new markets by offering faster, lower cost implementations to a far wider range of customers. The traditional 80:20 rule would no doubt apply, where the industrialised package would contain 80% of the implementation and IP, with only 20% being in the form of final adjustments to fit the customers' specific needs. This would certainly suit those integrators working in a vertical market sector, where the same IP and core implementation routines are employed for every customer.

On the other hand, of course, some of these implementers are likely to see such industrialisation as a negative development that simply reduces their revenue potential. It will, of course, be up to customers to decide which route they prefer to follow if the choice is available.

As it develops, software industrialisation may also change applications and service development practices. An important stage in the development process is defining the requirements needed. This is now the driver of that process, but it could easily become the key to future industrialisation. One only has to take Requirements Management systems a few logical steps further to see how the definition process could be mapped onto increasingly industrialised infrastructure and business process building environments.

This could be one more step towards the point where business users become, in effect, service and applications developers. Within an Infrastructure as a Service environment, such a model would allow business users to define and create the services required for 'just now', and order their removal once the task is completed.

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 3rd December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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For me, thin provisioning of storage is a logical extension to virtualising it. Early on, vendors who offered thin provisioning solutions had to struggle against scepticism backed by FUD from some of the big hardware vendors not over-enthusiastic about a technology which helped customers buy less tin.

The inevitable happened. Gradually there was greater adoption of hardware-software solutions offering thin provisioning until, this year, most of the leaders now offer some thin provisioning flavour. IBM even offers it in its SAN Volume Controller (SVC) appliance—which effectively makes it available across multiple vendors' back-end hardware if used through an SVC.

Thin provisioning means allocating disk storage space only as it is actually needed—which avoids purchasing extra capacity only for it to sit idle (but spinning and using energy). Typically, only 25% of the total physical disk allocation for a standard system is actually needed. This makes thin provisioning a very green technology, reducing expansion of disk resources (footprint), energy and heat output—and therefore cost. Equally, since the provisioning can be largely automatic, it can greatly reduce the need for management of disk resources and capacity planning.

So are these tough economic times the point at which thin provisioning is really going to take off? Sadly, I suspect not, at least in a big way. While the cost savings that may be made once installed sit fairly well with the economic downturn, the capital investment and a trade-off in performance may muddy the ROI case.

The performance issue falls into a couple of categories. The first is that if you increase individual disk utilisation because the data is spread across less platters you also increase disk contention and so lower overall throughput performance. This may not matter for most applications but does for the mission-critical ones, particularly if there are SLAs associated with them.

Pillar Data Systems' thin provisioning system counters this problem with a quality of service (QoS) feature so that critical applications can be given message queuing priority over others; this can be fine tuned. It is, of course, an extra job for the storage manager to consider.

A second issue is the type of application and storage being dealt with. Database management systems tend to grab their whole allocated space straight away; even if there is a work-around it could complicate things—or it may be a case of applying thin provisioning only to part of the storage—which increases the management load in deciding what can and cannot be included and perhaps copying a few files around as well. Yet a major selling point of thin provisioning is that it can automatically deal with space allocation issues so that the storage manager does not have to.

Another possible factor is how well the software can utilise freed-up disk space following deletion of old data. Total thin provisioning space savings are increased if the software can handle this automatically, but some systems cannot. But, for instance, Compellent's Dynamic Capacity thin provisioning feature eliminates allocated but unused capacity as it goes while 3PAR's InServe architecture inherently reallocates unused blocks. (Having said this, companies may not all delete enough data to make this very fruitful.)

In addition, if yours is an enterprise with mixed vendor equipment, you may think long and hard before installing yet another vendor's purpose-built thin provisioning hardware/software solution, knowing that you will have to redirect all the files and databases to be included to the new system. It might mean a fair amount of planning so that realising a real return could take a while. Incumbents which can add thin provisioning to existing hardware may do better.

Every vendor's thin provisioning offering is different and most only work on their own specific hardware. For the reasons given, it may also be difficult to clearly demonstrate a fast ROI so vendors will need to work closely with their potential clients in achieving that.

Thin provisioning has a chance of benefiting from the credit crunch—some think it will be a fat one.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd December 2008 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2008

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As enterprises scale up of their use of service oriented architecture (SOA), proper governance is providing an insurance effect. By deploying governance alongside and in sync with SOA development and deployment capabilities, enterprises are growing the use of SOA without stumbling—allowing companies to “crawl, walk, and run” to SOA without losing control.

SOA governance heightens the business benefits of services, increases IT efficiency returns, and reduces the risk that complexity could undermine the services lifecycle in large organizations. Services governance also sets the stage for leveraging cloud and third-party services, while managing the boundary between internal and external services.

To unpack the relationship between SOA, governance, cloud and IT management, I recently interviewed Tim Hall, director of SOA Products for HP Software and Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

The purposes of SOA governance has been to set the architectural vision and direction, lay the ground rules under which those activities are going to take place, and then foster collaboration between architects, and other people who engage in the processes of building solutions for companies, be they consumer focused, or be they within enterprise IT.

The whole thing is tracking your progress, where are you in this journey. It's not about installing a new pack of middleware and then declaring victory. You really have to measure along the way what you are doing, and how far you have gotten. Some measures that people start off looking at are things like reuse.

The whole notion of providing a service is to hide the layers of abstraction and to hide the complexity behind layers of abstraction, so that we can make changes behind the scenes that don't necessarily disrupt or alter the offering of the service. There are a lot of examples of this in the real world. Why hasn't IT been able to do a better job of capitalizing on those things?

This is one of those transformation opportunities. We're not just talking about Web services. We're talking about different ways in which we need to be able to flexibly compose and offer capabilities back to the business through a channel called a service. ... The adoption of services as a fundamental unit of commerce, if you will, within IT does something very fundamental to the way that people work together.

From HP's perspective, we are definitely trying to make sure that the collaboration between architects, quality assurance professionals, and operations personnel are there. That's kind of announcing that the various solution offerings that we're bringing to market are to make sure that none of these is an island. Those control points can reasonably be connected and allow for collaboration across all the different participants.

We're learning lots of interesting things about IT, and in particular, the ways that we can do things better. The whole notion of instilling an architectural vision to support change and flexibility; to give tools to the folks who are building composite systems, so they can better manage the roles and responsibilities for the various people that are participating in that; and better communicate with operations is something that we haven’t done very well.

It's really a matter of mapping your organizational maturity and what you're trying to achieve with the appropriate tools. People shouldn't be running out and buying tools, unless they really understand what problems those tools are going to solve, and the fact that certain organizations can introspect what they have done in the past and say what problems they want us to solve and or avoid.

The lessons that we're learning ... are specifically being applied to SOA right now, [but] have more far-reaching implications. As we look at things, like the different compositional patterns for systems that are coming—Web 2.0 technologies, Ajax, rich Internet applications (RIAs), putting front ends on some of these things, or cloud computing—all of these things are interrelated. My question is, should we not be applying these fantastic concepts and activities that we have been establishing through SOA governance more broadly to support all of these different types of next-generation composition?

From HP's perspective the answer is absolutely. The question is at what point are we going to be talking about next-generation application lifecycle management, or next-generation application composition and stop talking about SOA by itself as an island.

... There are more people coming to the table, more constituents coming to say, “How can I connect to these governance activities that are going on for services, but really for the purpose of generating some new business outcomes?” That, to me, is tremendously exciting.

I think one of the things you're going to see—I'm not sure how far in the future, it's coming up more and more these days—is an emphasis on understanding the business-to-business connections, or what some folks will call "federation."

I want to be very specific when I say "federation," because it is one of those overloaded terms that creates a lot of mystery. If we can take the wraps off of federation, what we're talking about is a pattern for how to expose the capabilities that I own within my domain to other domains. Those other domains could be within my organization, they could be elsewhere, or they could be third parties.

The good news is that SOA fundamentally supports that type of activity. The question is how well the tools support that activity today.

As we move into a more comprehensive cloud set of offerings, we're going to need to federate the different instances of services, metadata, their ownership, the consumption of those pieces, and really formalizing the relationships of using tools between the consumers and providers of those things.

When I say establishing relationships, I think about trading-partner agreements that get put in place, or supply chain agreements. They get put between supply chain partners about what information they're going to share and in what context they can use that.

We're really talking about doing the same kind of formalization with the consumption and providing of these various capabilities, in order for models like SaaS and cloud to scale up to the level that they need to in order to make a significant impact.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The full podcast is also available for download here.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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So far in this series of articles I have discussed the failures of traditional data quality tools when it comes to matching in general and product and complex data matching in particular. However, these aren't the only areas they fall down in: they are not very good at dealing with names either (which makes one wonder what they are good at?).

Suppose you are Chinese and you go to live in America. Do you keep your Chinese name? Do you anglicise it? If so, how? Do you reverse your names so that your forename goes first? Now consider a data quality solution trying to match in these circumstances. Or think about criminals with 30 different aliases: how do you match these names?

Fortunately, the data quality fraternity (or some of them) has owned up to this omission in its capabilities. Thus IBM bought LAS (now Global Name Recognition) and Informatica more recently acquired Identity Systems, though the other vendors in the market remain in the cold in this regard.

However, if you have read the previous articles in this series you will know that lack of ability when it comes to names is the least of my concerns when it comes to data quality and that my real worry is that all the leading products have been built using out-of-date technology that has now been superseded.

In the first article I highlighted Netrics, which uses mathematical modelling as an alternative to the conventional pattern-matching used by the traditional vendors. And in the second article I mentioned Silver Creek, which uses a semantic approach. In particular, both of these products feature self-learning capabilities (as does Zoomix, recently acquired by Microsoft) that improve the efficiency of the match process over time while reducing the amount of human involvement that is required.

It is not that these products are new—Silver Creek has been around for a number of years, Netrics has 150 odd customers—but I have now got to the point where I think we need the existing market to be radically disrupted. Current products are being incrementally improved but incremental improvements are not enough: we need dramatic improvements. Otherwise, most companies will continue to (ineffectively) use manual efforts for data cleansing because they can't see the cost benefits (and I am not sure I can blame them) of moving to inadequate pattern-based matching products.

If data quality is the huge issue we all say it is, and it is, then we owe it to users to actually provide them with technologies that help them to resolve those problems rather than just a sop, which is what they are, in most cases, getting. Leading vendors need to recognise that the likes of Netrics and Silver Creek offer way better technology than they do and they need to buy or build comparable capability as soon as possible if they are not to continue to disappoint the market generally.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd December 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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OK, I'm at Day 1 of the Worldwide Compuware Uniface User Conference (CU2008) and it's pretty good. I've always liked Uniface - its a productive way of building rich applications at an abstraction level somewhat above that of C++ (although that's a little unfair; C++ and its libraries works a little differently)

Compuware announced immediate availability of Uniface 9.3 Application Platform Suite today. This offers simplified deployment, targeting businesses who don't maintain an IT specialist on-site and want to run their applications 24x7.

It also has an enhanced mobile interface (if you can write Uniface, you can easily get your data onto a mobile device; which is now end-user configurable) and something called a “cross reference feature”. This last is a faculty for generating, maintaining, reporting and using cross reference information, identifying where objects are referenced in applications. It is particularly useful as service-oriented architectures are introduced—something similar was available in Uniface 8.4 but was dropped and is now being put back in, as a completely new implementation, by user request.

But what's with the yoof culture and the rock guitar theme running through CU2008? Perhaps I'm old and titter and bwisted, but I'm not sure I need to associate Uniface with kids and guitars, in order to realise that its a pretty good tool still (perhaps I'm still wound up about Rational and it's Superheroes—I thought the last thing development needed was a superhero culture). Still, I suppose it's all a bit of fun—most people seemed to be enjoying the Rock Party (complete with Elvis) Compuware threw on Monday night.

Talking to Sogeti from the Netherlands, Uniface is still pretty active on its own turf, with people who were looking at other technologies returning to the fold. After all. It's still very productive, still focuses on delivering business automation rather than technology games, still makes a profit and its owner isn't in debt. Around Xmas 2008, that looks pretty good to me. Uniface might be another of the more solid companies with a real provenance to benefit from a risk-averse recession-oriented mood.

I got to an interesting breakout from Karl Sup (Development Director JDA Software Inc) on Uniface's Unicode support (a Uniface 9 feature and now pretty much all patched and working; partly due to JDA's efforts)—obviously, for a multinational product company, it makes worldwide language support much easier. However, one interesting point was that the business people in JDA often missed the potential business benefit from, for example, now being able to store all your data in one database regardless of language. And one more thing, having got a team together to implement and test the Unicode conversion, JDA took the opportunity to clean up its applications and remove legacy "style" anomalies and other issues—a visible benefit from a very small incremental effort, which shows a forward thinking approach others could usefully emulate.

So, that's about it for Day 1. Tomorrow, amongst other things, we get a preview of what's in Uniface 9.4 (which goes into Beta at CU2008) for RIA (Rich Internet Applications.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 1st December 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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Just in time for Thanksgiving is the general availability of IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint, a new product from Cognos (now part of IBM) that was first announced in October. Many master data management (MDM) vendors concentrate on storing and managing operational master data such as customer, product and location, but vary significantly as to the level of support they have for master dimension management and the life-cycle of that data. For example if you are a marketing organisation then you may have an international product hierarchy. Producing an updated version of this, particularly if the structure of the hierarchy changes, is no trivial affair, and a draft version will need to reviewed and tinkered with by various stakeholders, with possibly several versions being worked on in parallel, and then these modifications reconciled into a final version which is then made live and updated into assorted operational systems.

Similarly, while every MDM product has some sort of hierarchy management, the devil is in the detail. Can you link together multiple hierarchies which map logically together at some levels but not others e.g. a 4 level hierarchy with a 3 level hierarchy, which have three levels in common but has one additional level of detail in the deeper hierarchy? Or how about a self-referencing hierarchy such as a bill of materials situation, where the number of levels in the hierarchy is itself variable depending on the data involved? What about being able to compare versions of the hierarchies, say last summer's sales region with this summer's? In many organisations such things are handled in spreadsheets or custom applications.

These are all real business problems in a variety of industries, and this is where the Business Viewpoint tool is firmly pitched. Concentrating here rather than at the operational data hub end of the MDM spectrum, this tool is aimed more at "analytical MDM", rather like Kalido, Orchestra Networks, Oracle DRM and Statature (until its acquisition by Microsoft). It is a modern, SOA-based tool, intended to allow business users to be able to manage hierarchies and workflow. It appears to handle the complex cases mentioned above, and there is an API to allow customisation if need be for really esoteric needs. The hierarchies and workflow are stored in a relational database repository, and it is possible to import and export the hierarchies via files to other products such as IBM's mainstream MDM technology. There is also a publish-and-subscribe ability to allow changes to be synchronised with 3rd party systems as well as (naturally) across the Cognos portfolio and Infosphere IBM. It is important to understand that this does not store actual data values, such as sales figures or indeed any business transactions. The hierarchies can by synchronised with the Cognos toolset, and through their open interfaces I suggest other 3rd party BI tools could make use of them in heterogeneous environments. This can be used to report off an existing data warehouse, but it is a stand-alone product.

The challenge that IBM will need to address is explaining how this fits with its already rather full suite of MDM technologies, brought together under the Infosphere banner. Certainly both the existing MDM product lines have both hierarchy management and workflow support, so this is yet a third flavour. Admittedly MDM is all about bringing together disparate views of master data, so it will be possible to set up workflow to ensure a managed way of updating the data in the respective tools. However there is obviously a degree of extra complexity in maintaining one set of hierarchies in this tool, and another in the (currently two separate) MDM repositories of IBM's main MDM products. Moreover certain full function MDM technologies, such as Orchestra Network (amongst others) already have this functionality.

On the positive side, there is an opportunity here for IBM to review its long term roadmap and consider incorporating the capabilities of Business Viewpoint, which seems to me quite well thought-out, into its broader MDM vision. Since hierarchy management and data governance workflow support are critical areas for a successful MDM application, at least this will raise the profile of these areas within the IBM product management team, hopefully resulting in a stronger product suite in the long term.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 28th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I recently wrote about the deficiencies of traditional data quality tools when it comes to data matching. How the conventional pattern-based approach with user defined rules for weights simply can't hack it. In this article I want to take that further and consider the difficulties that arise when you get beyond names and addresses and other relatively simple data and start to consider complex data such as products.

Here the problems are the same but magnified. Not only may you have strings of descriptive data but embedded within that may be technical terms (and symbols), weights and measures and abbreviations. Often, the same product code may be used for different parts in different countries. And then there are foreign languages to be considered. Not surprisingly, one company I recently spoke to was only getting a 35% match rate for its product data when using conventional approaches to data quality. In other words, almost two thirds of matches had to be identified manually.

With figures like that it's perhaps no surprise that most data quality vendors still argue that their biggest competitor is hand coding.

Anyway, that doesn't mean that there isn't a solution. That same company today is getting a match rate of better than 85% using Silver Creek's software.

As in my last article, Silver Creek doesn't use a pattern-based approach to matching but instead focuses on semantics: understanding the meaning of the data rather than its ability to fit a pattern. Doing this means that it is easy to see that "mtr" = "motor" = "moteur" and so on. What's more, it too is self-learning, so that you don't have to manually define and maintain rules for the weights that determine how probable a match is.

It isn't, of course, that the traditional vendors in this field are not doing something about product data. The typical approach is to adding parsing into their existing offerings so that they can support unstructured (and multi-lingual) text. What this effectively does is to use the parsing to recognise patterns within the text in a similar way to the sorts of products that extract "context" from documents. Certainly, as far as the data quality vendors are concerned, this has improved their capabilities and may even make them reasonably suitable for simple product environments. However, these solutions are still based on pattern recognition and will always require a lot of manual effort (and, therefore, expense). In my opinion, pattern recognition has limited utility when it comes to all but the very simplest matching. Moreover, traditional approaches do not incorporate self-learning.

The bottom line is that pattern recognition is not good enough and is insufficient. Moreover, the whole probabilistic, statistical, rules-based approach that typifies conventional data quality products is time consuming, expensive and inadequate. We need a new approach. One such is exemplified by Silver Creek's technology.

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By: Dr Sam De Silva, Senior Associate, Taylor Walton Solicitors Posted: 28th November 2008 Copyright Taylor Walton Solicitors © 2008

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For those CIOs or IT directors out there, I am sure most of you at some stage have signed a software licence agreement. The following warranty in a license agreement therefore should be familiar to you:

"Licensor warrants that the Software will perform substantially in accordance with its accompanying documentation for a warranty period of 90 days from the date of this Agreement ... Licensee's sole remedy for any breach of this warranty is for Licensor to, at its option, repair or replace the Software or provide Licensee with a refund of the fees paid for the affected Software."

You may think that this is fairly standard wording (which it is) and is probably not worthwhile considering any further. This is dangerous thinking. Although the clause appears harmless and is short, before giving your autograph to the software vendor, I suggest you ask yourself the following questions.

What is the benchmark for performance?
The current benchmark for the performance of the software may be inadequate because there is a reference to the "accompanying documentation".

For these reasons you should probably consider the following:

• What is in the documentation? Does it actually promise any particular functionality or performance, or is it just operating instructions? Do you even have a copy of it?
• Can the vendor change the documentation at its discretion? If so, what is there to stop it from diluting its commitments?
• What in practice is "substantial performance"? Does that mean, for example, that only 80 per cent of key functionality needs to be delivered?

Ideally, you may want to refer to a particular document (such as the "Software Specifications") that sets out the requirements and specifications for the software. You may also want to consider what other warranties could be added (for example, in relation to the documentation, integration, and infringement of third-party IP rights).

Does the warranty period make sense?
You may have decided to avoid the big-bang implementation. Instead you have decided to roll out different modules of the software over a period of 12 months. It will be four months until the go-live date for the first module. However, if you stick with the current 90 day period, the software may not even have been delivered before the warranty has expired (because the 90 days runs from the date of signing the agreement, not the go-live date). You should aim to adjust the length and/or start date of the warranty period so the warranty applies when the software is actually being used and problems are more likely to be revealed. As the software is being delivered in modules, you would ideally negotiate a warranty period for each module or a period long enough to have the same effect. You should also check that the warranty covers all of the modules working together and any corrections or updates to any modules.

Are the remedies meaningful?
As with most software licences, the vendor has promised the three R's for a breach of the warranty—repair, replace or refund. However, these remedies are expressed to be your only remedies. This may result in a remedy that is inadequate as a partial refund of the licence fee may be insignificant in comparison to the actual losses your business may suffer. You should aim to clarify that you can pursue other remedies. The vendor also gets to choose which remedy applies. Ideally, you would choose. However, if you cannot negotiate this you may be able to agree that the vendor will exercise its choice in a reasonable manner and will at least do what it can to resolve the problem by repairing or replacing the software before handing over a refund.

Finally, the warranty is silent as to how quickly the vendor is expected to fix a breach of warranty. For example, is it within five days or is it within the next release? You should try to set some expectations as to how quickly a problem is to be resolved. You could also consider referring to the service levels in the support contract.

So, although the clause appears standard and innocuous, you can see from the above that even such a short clause has a number of key issues which should be considered in more detail.

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

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PDF and Flash files are ubiquitous with hundreds of millions of files on the web. They contain an enormous amount of useful, important and interesting information most of which is not available on-line in any other format. The audience for these files will include people with disabilities. Electronic files are particularly important for people with disabilities that make it difficult or impossible for them to access hardcopy. This may be because of a vision impairment, or a physical impairment that prevents them holding a book, or because they find reading difficult and benefit from having the text read to them. Electronic files can also provide alternative presentations of material, for example captioning for people with hearing impairments. There are moral, legal and financial reasons for making electronic information, including PDF and Flash, accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

Historically PDF and Flash were not accessible. In 2001 Adobe made changes to enable the files to be accessible. It has worked very hard since then to extend the document formats and the various readers and development tools to make it easier to create and distribute files that are accessible. As well as working on the technology Adobe has been very active on the various standards bodies, in particular ISO, and industry committees such as AIA to ensure the formats are fully defined and supported.

Even with all this effort there are still an enormous number of files being distributed that are not accessible. This is partly through ignorance of the creators of the file and partly because it has been difficult to create well formed files. Adobe has made some announcements recently that tackle both these issues.

Training Material

A new set of training materials is available made up of a set of documents on accessibility, including one describing how to create accessible PDF from Microsoft Word. This give clear guidance on how to author Word documents and the steps required to turn them into accessible PDF. The steps are clearly laid out and include description of some actions that are required even though it might be thought that they would have been done automatically. This clarity is important as it means that a user will not think they have done something wrong, or missed something out, when they have to touch-up the file at the end.

DAISY Support

Although PDF can be made accessible the preferred format for many people with vision impairments is DAISY (the digital talking book standard). The latest version of Adobe InDesign CS4 includes a function to export a file in the DAISY DTBook format. Being able to generate standard print format, large print format, accessible PDF files and DAISY files from a single source with ease means that the document can be provided in the most convenient and usable format for a specific user. This is a better solution than trying to create a one-size-fits-all solution.

Flash Controls

Flash CS4 Professional offers improvements to the FLVPlayback video component that make the default player controls accessible automatically, without any coding required by the developer. At present very few Flash videos are controllable from the keyboard but instead require careful mouse positioning which is obviously impossible for people with vision impairments but is also difficult for people with limited hand control. In future any Flash video will be controllable by a small number of standard shortcut keys.

Colour Blind Support

People who are colour blind can find it difficult, or impossible, to distinguish colours that look distinctly different to people with full colour vision. Colour Universal Design (CUD) filters simulate what a person who is colour blind will see; the designer can then modify hues and tones to help the user distinguish the different areas of colour. At the same time the designer should consider distinguishing the areas of colour by other means such as patterns, borders or fonts.

Adobe has integrated support for Colour Universal Design (CUD) filters in Illustrator and Photoshop to help authors create accessible images.

These announcements show Adobe's continued commitment to improving the accessibility of its products and the accessibility of the output of these products.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 26th November 2008 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2008

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Much has been said about cloud computing in 2008, and still many knowledgeable IT people scratch their heads over what it all really means. They want to know: How can enterprises best prepare to take advantage of this shift in IT resources—but avoid transitional risks and uncertainty?

Cloud and on-premises compute grids exploit breakthroughs in technology architecture and the confluence of new business models, this is clear. In times when every dollar counts more than ever, the enticements to experiment with cloud models is powerful. At the same time, there is very little margin for error. Adopting new IT approaches can not injure the business interests, image or fiscal performance of any company.

To understand more about the balance and best practices route to emerging cloud and utility IT values, I recently spoke to executives at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and its EDS brethren. They point to the need to understand the role of services oriented architecture (SOA) and governance in exploring cloud opportunities. The future looks promising for cloud adoption, as long as there's a coordinated and managed approach.

To learn more about enterprise cloud adoption, please join the discussion with Rebecca Lawson, Director of Service Management and Cloud Solutions at HP; Scott McClellan, Vice President and Chief Technologist of Scalable Computing and Infrastructure in HP’s Technology Solutions Group, and Norman Lindsey, Chief Architect for Flexible Computing Services at EDS, an HP company.

Here are some excerpts:

Really, from an enterprise point of view, when running mission-critical applications that need security and reliability and are operating with service-level agreements (SLAs), etc., the cloud isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. There are both technical and business reasons why that’s the case.

As far as the idea of the cost savings, it’s good to look at why that is the case in a few certain areas, and then to think about how you can reduce the cost in your own infrastructure by using automation and virtualization technologies that are available today, and that are also used in the “cloud.” But, that doesn’t mean you have to go out to the cloud to automate and virtualize to reduce some cost in your infrastructure.

The cloud is an evolution of other ideas that have come before it, grid, and before that Web services. All these things combine to enable people to start thinking of this as delivering service with a different business model, where we are paying for it by the unit, or in advance, or after the fact.

Virtualization and these other approaches enable the cloud, but they aren’t necessarily the cloud. What IT departments have to do is start to think about what is it they’re trying to accomplish, what business problem they’re trying to address, as they look at cloud providers or cloud technologies to try and help solve those problems.

We’ve seen people do their own private utilities versus public utilities such as flexible computing services provide. The idea of a private utility is that, within an organization, they agree to share resources and allow the boundaries to slide back and forth to hit the best utilization out of the fixed set of assets or maybe a growing set of assets.

The same idea is in a public utility or a public cloud, except that now a third party is providing those assets and providing that as a service. It increases the concerns and considerations that you have to bring to the party. You have to think about problems that you didn’t have to think about when you had a private utility.

When you go to a public space, security is paramount. What do I do with my proprietary information and service levels? How certain can I get what I need when I need it? The promise with the cloud is great, but the uncertainty has caused people to come up short and decide maybe it’s better if I do it myself, versus utilizing an outside service.

We need to think in terms of which services provide what level of value, based on the complexion of that particular company—and it’s never going to be the same for all companies. Some companies can use Google Gmail as an email service. Other companies wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, maybe for reasons of security, data integrity, access rights, regulations, or what have you. So weighing the value is going to become the critical thing for IT.

In the longer term, the more overarching impact of cloud comes when your IT department can deliver value back to the business, rather than just taking cost out. Some examples of that are using aspects of social networking and other aspects of cloud computing, and the fact that cloud is delivered over ubiquitous media, the Internet, to increase share of wallet, increase market share, maybe bring higher margin to a business, and build ecosystems, and drive user communities for a business. That’s where cloud brings value to a business and that’s obviously important.

You can start to look around at your internal capabilities, versus external, and make some decisions as to how you want to solve that problem, whether buying an external service or creating a service internally and delivering it to your customers with your own internal utility. ... This will force IT to come closer to the people in the business and really understand what is the business objective, and then find the right service that maps to the value of that objective. Again, we can’t emphasize it enough. This should really change behavioral dynamics in IT and how they think about what their job is.

Basically, within the spectrum of things that are cloud computing, you have everything from infrastructure as a service … all the way up through virtualized infrastructure, a platform on top of that, an application on top of that, or perhaps a completely re-architected true cloud-computing offering.

As you move up that spectrum, I think the benefits increase, but in not all cases are the application domains available in all of those environments. ... What services are available through some cloud model, what model of availability, what are the characteristics of that model, what are the requirements for that particular service—and what are the security performance, continuity integration, and compliance requirements? Those all have to be taken in holistically and through a governance model to make the decision whether we are going to move from the traditional deployment model to a cloud-delivery model, and if so, which one.

In the process of getting to a service-centric IT governance model, they’re going to have to deal with the governance model for deploying new services. Again, I think risk is partly a function of benefit. So when there is a marginal benefit or when the stakes are very high, you would want to be very conservative in terms of your risk profile.

The tougher economic conditions would heighten the acceleration of cloud computing, and not just because of the opportunity to save cost. Reinforcing what we brought up earlier, there are some clear opportunities to bring value to your business.

Examples of that are things like being able to drive user communities, users and consumers of whatever it is your business produces, using techniques of social networking, and things like that.

There is the question of how to use the advantages you get from cloud computing to drive differentiation for your business versus your competitors, because they’re hesitating, or not using it, because they’re being risk-averse. In addition, that compliments the benefits you get from cost savings.

What I really meant is that, if you are an IT shop and you are trying to decide what to move to a cloud paradigm or a cloud model, you’re likely to really focus on the places where either you can get that big win—because moving this particular service to a cloud paradigm is going to bring you some positive differentiation, some value to your company.

Or, you are going to get that big cost savings from the places where it's the most mission-critical—the place where you have the least tolerance for downtime, and you have the greatest continuity requirements, or where the performance SLA has been most stringent. The thinking may be, “Well, we’ll tackle that later. We’re not going to take a risk on something like that right now.”

In the places where the risk is not as great—and the reward either in terms of cost or value looks good—the current economic conditions are just going to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in enterprises for those areas. And they definitely do exist.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The full podcast is also available for download here.

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By: Tony Lock, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 26th November 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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Some things in life, for example taxes, taxis and the music of younger generations, seem to have been around forever yet we are still not comfortable with them. The same can be said of some areas of IT, with "Backup and Recovery" springing readily to mind. Over the course of the last few weeks I have taken part at a number of round tables hosted by DCG Group and one theme that has been common to all attendees has been a recognition that there are still major challenges getting backup and recovery processes right.

Backup and recovery processes have been undertaken since the beginning of IT. In fact it can be argued that the very antiquity of the operation works against the process itself. In certain organisations backup processes have been working so long that they have almost, but not quite, become a tradition. "We do backups because we have always carried out backups" is the subtext. In fact it is probably fairer to say that "We have problems with backups but, then again, we always have" is the prevailing attitude.

It goes without saying, or does it, that the recognition of having issues with backup processes makes the recovery of data / systems very difficult, if not impossible. It is worthwhile noting, some legal requirements prevalent in a few industry verticals aside, that at heart the only valid reason for carrying out backup and allied data protection operations at all is to put oneself in the comforting position of being able to recover information whenever so required.

Now it has to be admitted that it can very difficult to ensure that backup and recovery systems deliver the degree of protection desired by the organisation. Not least amongst the issues is that data volumes are growing so rapidly whilst business operations require access to information for ever increasing time windows that simply taking backups quickly enough can be a non-trivial challenge. There are now several techniques available to address this challenge from using disk to disk (and then perhaps to tape) backups or the use of "snapshots" / point-in-time copies / SaaS / CDP and managed service solutions, never mind just faster tape systems.

However, beyond the mere technical details of how to get backups to be taken within the desired backup window or ensuring that data can be recovered with the required recovery time objectives, there are other, perhaps less visible, obstacles to be overcome. Many of these are wrapped up in the very fact that data is now routinely held in so many locations, by no means all of them sitting inside a data centre. Just tracking down data to be protected, understanding the desired backup and restore characteristics of the information and its global business value is a task that can be extremely difficult to undertake, especially given that it can never be considered completed as things change so rapidly. The advent of "virtualisation" of systems in mainstream IT operations is further exacerbating this situation.

Finally there is the ultimate difficulty, and this is wrapped up in the very fact that backup and recovery has been around so long. It is simply not fashionable or exciting. It is also difficult to be able to test recovery scenarios with sufficient frequency. Indeed many organisations will admit that they test their recovery capabilities very rarely and tend to rely on getting it right when there is a real world need to recover data to hone their operations.

It must also be said that for operations staff tasked with keeping systems working in line with business demands there is never enough, or any, time to learn about new solutions, identify best practices or to work out how things can be made better. And this applies across the entire gamut of business, never mind humble but ever-so-essential backup and recovery operations. This is likely to open up major opportunities for specialist providers of managed services and new solutions that help address the challenges both in backup and recovery as well as across much of the "routine" IT operational spectrum allowing the IT organisation to focus more sharply on matters deemed to be of more value to the business.

Can backup and recovery operations ever routinely reach 100 percent coverage at an affordable cost? Maybe not, but there is clearly plenty of room to make things better for everyone concerned, i.e. the entire business.

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By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 25th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I learnt a new word the other day—"inculturated". Apparently it has something to do with the way IT systems can become part of an organisation's way of working. All I do know is that the spell checker in Word hates it, which demonstrates how far "inculturated" is from any known English language derivative.

Anyway, I digress. My increased vocabulary was down to spending some quality time with CA to learn more about their vision, products and ideas on the future.

I must admit to still being a new boy at the CA party. I attended my first ever CA analyst event last year and I am still getting to grips with this sizeable beast of an IT vendor. I was aware of the problems faced by the old CA and have been watching their reinvention with interest. Being polite I only mentioned the old CA once but I think I got away with it.

John Swainson, CEO of CA, has got the virtualisation thing big time. Nowadays no significant IT vendor's pitch can be complete without at least some reference to virtualisation, but Swainson went one further in demonstrating his commitment by presenting the first 10 minutes of his keynote using Second Life. Despite my pretty intense dislike of these virtual worlds at least you felt he really believed in the whole virtualisation thing, whether he did or not. It was also heart warming to note that Swainson's avatar was a half way decent rendition of the real life chap. Unlike many who would be tempted to represent themselves as a nubile 25 year old blonde with suitable appendages.

From a virtualisation perspective CA have a good claim to have been doing it for 40+ years, based on their experience with mainframe computers. It certainly looks as if they will be squeezing every ounce of virtualisation experience from the organisation to ensure they become a decent player in the market. CA believes that virtualisation will succeed or fail based on the ability of organisations to manage the virtual installation. Few would disagree—the notion of dynamically building and deploying virtual servers on the fly, doing work and then uninstalling in a short period of time causes all sorts of management issues, from licensing through to security.

According to Swainson there are 5 other disruptive technologies, as well as virtualisation, that CA are focusing on;

• Architectural convergence
• SOA
• Social networking (inside the corporate network)
• Cloud computing
• The explosion of IP addressable devices

Whilst I would agree these are new challenges I do not feel I could label them all as disruptive.

Whilst looking into the near and medium term future is fine, the more important challenges faced by IT is how it can further integrate into the business and demonstrate real, tangible benefit, reduce costs and become a key part of an organisation's customer experience.

EITM - Enterprise IT Management is the place holder for CA's strategy to support organisations and help them govern, manage and secure their IT. In support of this and moves to software as a service (SaaS), CA announced a range of products that will help to deliver a more secure environment, including SOA Security Manager, designed to prevent XML-based malware attacks.

There is no doubt that CA has a very strong portfolio of products, coupled with a deep R+D culture. Despite the current economic conditions they remain bullish that their products will speak for themselves and that they will emerge from the inevitable downturn stronger than before. From what I have seen they seem to be on the right track.

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