KEY POINTS:
Memo from Santa to chief technology elves:
Dear Ernie and Rod,
Guys, it's time I got the presents for once. So as soon as this year's madness is behind us on December 26, I'm instigating a major IT upgrade project across the entire North Pole facility.
I've been reading the letters the geeky company executives send in, so I've got a pretty good idea what's hot in business technology at the moment. This is what I want installed to make the operation run more productively in 2008:
COMMUNICATIONS
I'm tired of always getting voicemail when I call certain elves' landlines and mobile phones. It's time we joined the growing number of organisations using unified communications (UC) and "presence" technologies to track where staff are and how they can be contacted.
These technologies push calls and messages out to whichever device - landline, PC, laptop or mobile - staff happen to be using at the time. The aim is to boost worker productivity by eliminating time wasted leaving, checking or returning messages on multiple devices.
When I spoke to Microsoft's general manager for unified communications, Kim Akers, she made the bold assertion that UCs' impact on businesses would be as fundamental as the changes brought about by email in the 1990s.
"If you think about the way email transformed the way we work, we say UC and presence - the ability to click to communicate from any application, whether it's your phone or your PC - we think it's that same size of shift [as email]," she told me.
In our case we'll combine the UC project with the installation of an internet-based phone system. Getting enough broadband bandwidth shouldn't be a problem, after all this is the North Pole, not some remote backblock like Kohimarama.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
This is the art of gleaning useful business information out of gigabytes of corporate data. It's become big business, and is something that could really help us across the procurement, logistics and transportation sides of the business.
The high level of enthusiasm for business intelligence was demonstrated in October when software giant SAP announced a US$6.8 billion takeover of BI specialist Business Objects. Sales of BI technology are growing as the software becomes easier for managers to use and according to Rob Wells, Business Intelligence's New Zealand and Australia managing director, that trend will continue next year.
"Our job is to make the business intelligence architecture - the view of the performance of the business - as easy to interact with as your iPod is. That's where you'll see a lot of movement in 2008," Wells told me.
According to another one of my mates, Bruno Aziza, a senior Microsoft product manager specialising in BI, industry consolidation - the buying-up of BI specialists by big software vendors - will continue next year and will help grow the market.
WEB 2.0 SOFTWARE
My buddy Alistair Rennie, an IBM vice-president who knows about these things, says 2008 is going to be the year when Facebook-type interactive directories become big business at work. Fair enough too. Why should the kids get all the good toys?
As Rennie points out, while most businesses use some form of directory that lists staff members' names, departments, and contact details, these don't let you find someone based on what they know, their areas of expertise, or the topics they're interested in.
"We're having lots of engagement with customers who want to take that basic directory information and transform it into a very rich social directory so that if I'm perhaps a new employee to a company and I'm working on a project I can search the enterprise for people who have expertise in the area I'm working on and get connected to them more quickly and become productive more quickly," Rennie told me.
"Being able to maintain some form of consistency of the knowledge they build up as an organisation and having it be available and searchable is a real business issue, so I think it will be a very big area of investment."
I agree. Getting this type of software working across the North Pole site should boost our productivity when the requests start flooding in late next year.
Speaking of enhancing productivity, I've decided to scrap New Zealand from this year's December 25 operation. I've already given them a new Telecom boss, Paul Reynolds, this year. What more do they expect?
Festive greetings,
Santa Claus
