Gartner: Enlightenment in real time

This column comes to you from the Gartner Spring Symposium in Denver. I suspect most of you have never been to one of Gartner’s symposia; it was my first time, and as a journalist, I have to attend all kinds of meetings. But I don’t plan to miss another one of these if I can help it.

This symposium is like fertilizer for your brain. You already have the seeds of wisdom in your head; these program sessions help them grow and flower. Every speaker is a consultant whose entire workday is spent immersed in his or her IT specialty. Not only do they know their specialties cold, but they also have obvious enthusiasm for them. They share all that with the attendees, providing context, a vision of the future, and practical, sensible advice. You get meals and refreshments to boot.

The sharing comes not only in the form of seminars, of which there are dozens in more than 30 topic areas on each of the four days the symposium runs, but also in the opportunity to consult one-on-one with Gartner analysts. Considering how much Gartner charges for this privilege at other times of the year, this opportunity alone pays for a large part of the more than $3,000 cost of attending the symposium. (In the spirit of full disclosure, Gartner picked up the tab for my admission to the symposium because I’m a member of the press.)

At the conference’s opening keynote session, Gartner’s main thesis held that having real-time information about the domains for which you’re responsible is the key to managing your business better. To get that information, you need to build an “enterprise nervous system” that connects your people, locations, and devices. Plan to have every collaborative system you implement work in real time.

For instance, suppose you’re a network hardware vendor and you need to build a supply-chain application. Think ahead to when your hardware reaches the customer. Build a function into the installation process so the hardware sends a message back to your database alerting you to the fact that the device is in service–no longer in the warehouse or in transit–and include other information for your post-sales support staff. Think how valuable it would be to have that information in real time, instead of having to wait for it to bubble up through your current channels.

In general terms, you want to build dynamic feeds from your business’s top trend points and business processes. With that information, you can react to stave off problems, whether that means increasing storage capacity or bandwidth, getting inventory to where it needs to go, or pulling back from unprofitable ventures quickly. Properly acted on, real-time information can translate to a better bottom line.

I picked up more worthwhile insights from the other sessions I attended, many of which I’ll share with you over the coming weeks.

I haven’t even touched on ITxpo, which is not a town in Mexico but the mini-trade show that goes along with the symposium. While the booths are smaller than those at, say, NetWorld+Interop (which coincided with Gartner’s gathering this year), overt hype and booth bunnies are both conspicuously absent, and the tchotchkes are of unusually high quality. Instead of hype and flash, real product managers are available to answer attendees’ questions. Plus, because the number of attendees is manageable, you can get face time at even the most popular booths.

Giga Information Group offers a similar comprehensive seminar called GigaWorld, Jupiter Media Metrix has MindShare, Esther Dyson’s EDventure Holdings sponsors PC Forum, while analyst groups such as Meta Group and Yankee Group offer more finely focused gatherings.

I’ve been skeptical of analyst firms in the past, because some of what they do is too obvious to be worth what you pay for it. Gartner’s Symposium is making me re-evaluate my attitude.

Hire a chief privacy officer to keep sensitive material private

If you’ve spent more than a week as an IT professional, you’re aware that security is a big part of everyone’s job.

From network administrators, who need to lock down computing resources both figuratively and literally, to end users, who should practice safe computing with antivirus software and keep passwords in their heads, everyone has a responsibility to protect a corporation’s interests.

Good security is tough to keep in place, but it’s simplicity itself compared with the morass of privacy concerns for organizations. Privacy is more than physically securing data–it encompasses design decisions, public policy, and even legal compliance. Few network professionals want to add those concerns to the overwhelming challenges they already face.

For that reason, some companies are creating a new job title: chief privacy officer. The CPO’s job is anything but petty; he or she sits at the confluence of numerous business processes and ideally becomes the funnel (not the bottleneck) for all of a company’s privacy concerns.

American Express, AT&T, DoubleClick, Excite@Home, General Motors, IBM, Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co., and Verizon are among the organizations that have appointed CPOs in recent months. Dr. Alan Westin, publisher of Privacy & American Business, estimates there are now 200 to 300 CPOs in the United States, including many in the financial and health-care sectors.

Privacy, while always a concern, is becoming even more timely as Microsoft prepares to release Internet Explorer 6. IE 6 contains features that let you prevent your users’ browsers from accessing sites without a satisfactory privacy policy, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) project. That feature is optional, but if you’re responsible for your corporate Web site, it behooves you to put it in compliance with P3P to satisfy organizations that care.

Security is part of the CPO’s job, and ideally privacy should be a security administrator’s concern, but administrators often focus on technical issues to the exclusion of policy issues. That’s one of the benefits of having a CPO–it makes privacy someone’s explicit job duty. And that’s the bottom line: It doesn’t matter whether you create a new position called chief privacy officer. What matters is that you have systems in place in your organization for planning privacy into your business and reacting to privacy concerns or breaches.

What’s the best background for a CPO? Either an IT professional with strong privacy interests or a technology-savvy legal or public policy wonk. That’s public policy, not public relations! Either way, the person who fills the role will have to learn part of the job by doing it. Temperamentally, a CPO has to be a consensus-builder, able to work smoothly with multiple constituencies. No privacy decision is black and white, so CPOs must be prepared to weigh priorities and compromise when necessary.

If you’re going to go through the exercise of appointing a CPO, make sure you don’t create just a shell of a job. To be effective, a CPO must have authority and management backing to be able to intervene across departments when privacy issues arise.

CPOs should have their allegiances in the right place. Their first loyalty should be to your company’s customers and business partners. They need to ensure you have processes in place to prevent data from getting into the hands of anyone that’s not supposed to see it. After that, they can keep your company on the right side of the law, improve security, and help grow the business.

Appointing a CPO adds another layer of bureaucracy to your organization, along with its inherent expense. Can you afford one? Well, if a CPO saves you from an embarrassing admission or even a lawsuit, a better question is, can you not afford one?

IBM’s Informix purchase: Dueling databases?

So IBM is buying Informix Software, Informix Corp.’s database unit and the heart of the company. Good for Informix–a billion dollars is a lot of money. I’m not so sure, however, that it’s a bargain for IBM.

Informix is an example of a company that has persevered and succeeded. Founded in 1980, by the early ’90s it had become the premier Unix database vendor. But when it tried to move its database to other platforms, it ran up against Oracle, Sybase, and a host of platform-specific competitors. Over the last several years, Informix struggled to grow. Nevertheless, it built a stable of business applications for online transaction processing, data warehousing, and knowledge management around its database, which enabled it to establish a beachhead in such vertical-market sectors as retail, financial services, government, health care, manufacturing, media and publishing, and telecommunications.

Informix’s story has been one of slow growth, but recently that growth turned negative. The company’s financial performance, released last Tuesday, the same day the IBM purchase was announced, shows falling revenue and profits compared with last year. Nevertheless, Informix’s management has prudently socked away more than $250 million in cash, and the company has no debt on its balance sheet.

As for IBM, it didn’t exactly plug a hole in its product lineup by buying Informix. Its DB2 relational database has been on the market for more than a decade and has a thriving market, including its own international users group.

However, Informix provided some unique technology that made it especially attractive, according to Jeff Jones, senior program manager for IBM Data Management Solutions. From Informix’s Dynamic Server and Extended Parallel Server database engines, IBM hopes to learn new forms of parallel processing, new forms of indexing, and new performance ideas it may be able to bring to DB2. Some of Informix’s DataBlades (which Informix got with its Illustra acquisition) are similar to DB2′s Extenders, but others fill important niches. Jones says IBM will look for ways to weave in technology from Informix’s RedBrick Decision Server for data warehousing and decision support with DB2 and DB2 Warehouse Manager; it will look for similar synergies between Informix’s Cloudscape mobile and embedded database and DB2 Everyplace Server.

IBM says DB2 “will remain IBM’s flagship database product.” Jones says Informix’s 100,000 customers will help IBM gain market share to compete with Oracle. Still, the company should realize that the whole is less than the sum of the parts when a company has two overlapping database offerings.

If I were an Informix user, I wouldn’t be making contingency plans for migrating to DB2 (or any other platform) simply because of this announcement. If Lotus is any indication, IBM has a good record of letting a major acquisition continue its primary mission. Expect to see the parent company focus Informix on providing synergies with other IBM products and trimming away nonessential forays into marginal lines of business. IBM won’t walk away from an investment of this size, and its deep pockets should provide a reassuring measure of stability to its Informix users.