IBM to Acquire Star Analytics, Inc

IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire the software portfolio of Star Analytics Inc., a privately held business analytics company headquartered in Redwood City, California. The combination of IBM and Star Analytics software will further advance IBM’s business analytics initiatives, allowing organizations to gain faster access and real-time insight into specialized data sources.

With growing challenges in gaining a more complete view into varying types of data, companies are increasingly looking for ways to automate and provide business users with self-service access to critical information. Star Analytics software addresses a rising challenge for organizations: helping to automatically integrate essential information, reporting applications and business intelligence tools across their enterprises, on premise or from cloud computing environments. The software removes typical custom coding for specialized sources that is hard to maintain, and eliminates cumbersome manual processes.

“IBM sees an enormous opportunity for our clients to apply Star Analytics to the information they have stored in their financial applications,” said Leslie J Rechan, General Manager, IBM Business Analytics.  “And to then easily access it within their IBM performance management and business intelligence solutions.”  Read the rest.

Smarter Transformation: What I’ve Learned from a Decade of Change

Author Linda Sanford, Vice President, Enterprise Transformation

by Linda Sanford

Over the past decade, IBM has taken a systematic approach to transformation and has dramatically reshaped the company.

Since I’ve been helping lead that effort, I’m often asked by clients for advice on how to transform successfully. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but there are a few things that most organizations can start doing to create a smarter enterprise.

Read the rest of Linda Sanford’s post at Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

Imagination in the Enterprise

Once, not too
long ago in the Enterprise people found themselves working ever so diligently and thought everything was just honky dory thank you very much. Yet they were completely oblivious to the terrible neglect their
creative souls were facing. They had forgotten how to imagine, they had
stopped practicing the power of insight and ideas were fast becoming
stale. The ability to create without inhibition had been lost. Day and
night, they toiled over their business problems, trying to figure things out by themselves.

And then… information was given a name. Your name. Your face. Your
likes and dislikes. People started using social media to share opinion
and thoughts online. Previously suppressed ideas were openly expressed
and socialized.  People began to find their unique voice once more.
Authentic expression was embraced. The global drumbeat of new content
creation was heard throughout the Enterprise as social networks were
formed.

Stories of
life, hope and tragedy were shared. People around the world were
compelled to take action and quickly formed online communities.
Creative souls were stirred to think about the possibilities. They
began to imagine great things as ideas were shared from the inside out;
as seemingly abstract concepts were externalized they were developed
into innovative solutions, alongside others who saw their potential.

The people
had found a way to connect and create, but most of all they now had
confidence to express themselves and use their unique voice.

Image courtesy of Alice Bartlett

Social Computing has opened up new ways for people to solve problems, work with ideas and imagine great things. Have you given your team the opportunity to express themselves?

Jasmin Tragas aka Wonderwebby is
a Managing Consultant at IBM working in the area of Knowledge, Collaboration
and Learning Services, HCM, Australia.

Oh, the possibilities

Imagine there are no countries, it isn’t hard to do. The Médecins Sans Frontières or the doctors without borders have already dared to do so. To be one of them is to make a statement. Are there other such entities quietly in the making? Where membership doesn’t need you to make a stand? Not yet anyway?

There was once a time when the sun did not set on the British Empire. In modern times that very sun always shines on some shade of blue. As businesses continue to evolve from multinational corporations to global enterprises I can not but wonder whether the process of looking beyond the concept of the nation state and the evolution of the “enterprise state” has irreversibly begun.

The current tide is rushing towards globalization. What is a global corporation? Let me quote Sam Palmisano here:

“Simply put, the emerging globally integrated enterprise is a company that fashions its strategy, its management, and its operations in pursuit of a new goal: the integration of production and value delivery worldwide. State borders define less and less the boundaries of corporate thinking or practice.”

It is at this point I would like you to imagine; it’s easy if you try.

The Concept of Nation and Corporation
Before plunging into it, let me back off a bit and talk about both the nation and the corporation. The nation state sharing mutually acceptable borders is fairly a new concept in human history. There still are nations that have not been able to agree on the exact demarcation of “sovereign” rights. There are also cultures that are still struggling to establish their nation states.

Experiments with the modus operandi to running these nation states are far from over. The operating model of some version of governance by the people, for the people, of the people seems to have caught the imagination of a significant number of these nation states.

So the belief in the infallibility of the concept of the nation state is just to give ourselves a frame of reference. It allows us to build a lot of operating models. Quirks remain. Dual citizenship is a debated concept, but is not unheard of.  Now, what about the corporation?

If we look back at history, the corporation achieved the status of an individual or “legal entity” only when the owners were allowed “limited liability”. Then came the international or trans-national corporations, the East-India Company, for example. They relied on the muscle power and military might of the home nation to conduct their trade and commerce.

The MNC, or the multi national corporation, arrived as a solution to post war protectionism. They set up shop in multiple countries and followed the law of the land. This wasn’t a logical state of affairs and built in redundancies that were bottlenecks wealth generation.

Therefore came the strategic alliances and now the global enterprise. Elsewhere, on the canvass of nation states came alliances. Along with political alliances came the economic ones. The European Union, for example, is something that was inconceivable during the World War days.

Imagine the possibilities
Now. Imagine that humanity has come to terms with its biological and genetic limitations. We have learnt that we need to live as tribes and super tribes. Aggression is addressed by football, boxing, WWF and other such means. Every one believes and needs peace, prosperity, wisdom and health. Oh, the possibilities….

Submitted by Saumya Ganguly

A story about Enterprise 2.0 and eating cake

Once upon a time in the powerful yet often misunderstood world called
the Enterprise, people went to work in offices in small teams. They
personalized their cubicle walls with colorful family photos and
postcards of upcoming events. They would celebrate birthdays together
by singing around a delicious home baked cake while catching up on
project gossip. Occasionally jokes or stories about clients were shared
(or vented) across the partition. Generally speaking, it was a happy
little world where people worked hard in comfort of social surrounds.

 

Suddenly the world changed. It got flatter.
Teams were structured out of skilled individuals working in different countries
and different timezones. Baby Boomers started to retire or semi-retire.
More staff worked part time and remotely, either at home or on client
site. Desktops were replaced with laptops. Landlines were replaced with
mobiles. Even training was done online instead of in a classroom. The
birthday cake ritual was no more and we ate our own cake instead.

Individuals became more disconnected from their colleagues.
Deadlines became more immediate. Panic set in as skilled workers were more difficult to find or retain. Knowledge became trapped and lost,
only leaving behind a trail of email crumbs to collect. The world of the Enterprise was
functioning, but not necessarily effective.

Meanwhile, in another dimension not too far way, the curious beast
called the World Wide Web sprouted wings. It heard of the plight of the
cake ritual and became a thing called "Web 2.0" so that people could
sing, share stories and most importantly, eat cake together again. It evolved in the form of blogs, wikis, social networking sites, shared
bookmarking and a most unusual, beguiling creature called Twitter.
Virtual Worlds (like Secondlife) became a place where remote teams could get to know one
another, navigating a colorful, visual terrain to overcome obstacles
and create a sense of team once again.

Despite the new challenges of working from different locations,
timezones or reduced working hours, the world of the Enterprise once
again became an engaging place to work. It was easier to share
knowledge, photos, videos, events, stories, information and have
conversations with subject matter experts all around the world, even
having groundbreaking conversations with people outside of the
Enterprise using these new dynamic tools. In fact, the new way of working was producing more ways to innovate and collaborate within the Enterprise than ever before. Now that’s some kind of cake. The panic to find skilled
knowledge workers was over and the people shouted "hurrah".

Except for those
still working in the old Enterprise in little cubicles at their
desktops, who didn’t understand what the fuss was all about and why the
world needed to change at all.

Jasmin Tragas is
a Managing Consultant working in the area of Knowledge, Collaboration
and Learning Services, HCM, Australia. She has been with IBM since
2000, works part time and is the mother of three young children.