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Product Management, out of the box

Carole-Ann Matignon — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:57:47 GMT

I have met many of you over the years at industry shows or in customer meetings, probably not all of you though, so an introduction may be in order. I am in charge of Product Management for the Decision Management tools at Fair Isaac, which means that I am responsible for elaborating the vision for our technology products, building the roadmap and making it happen with the collaboration of Product Development of course, and all other necessary functions. As you will soon discover, I have a real passion for decision management.

Several customers have insisted over time to have people like me reveal what we do, why we do it and how you will benefit from it. As this blog is changing hands, we have decided to finally give you this insider story directly from the Product team. It is an exciting opportunity to share my perspective and my excitement on our products, what new features are to be released and how we thought they would help you. I have also convinced by dear friend and colleague Carlos, head of Product Development, to join me on this blog.

Another area I would like to explore with you is our take on the direction of the marketplace, and our vision of how new technologies or new trends are impacting our industry,

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Perceptive Pixel: Update

Matthew Hurst — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:10:29 GMT

I'm very late to this. When I first heard about Perceptive Pixel, I was very excited. Several videos of the very slick, very fun wall-mounted multi-touch based interface zipped around the blogosphere last year. But then there didn't seem to be much going on. Meanwhile, a number of companies started popularizing some of the elements of that interface, Apple with the iPhone (multi-touch), and Microsoft with the surface computer to name two obvious examples.

It turns out that Perceptive Pixel were in fact deploying their product. I don't watch broadcast tv so I had missed the fact that it was being used as a differentiator in discussing the primary elections in the US.

Here's an example.

Here's another one:

Future of News at Princeton

Matthew Hurst — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:58:32 GMT

I'm back in Seattle after attending the excellent Future of News workshop hosted by David Robinson and Ed Felten. There were many contributing factors to the success of the workshop, not least of which was the cross disciplinary nature of speakers, panelists and attendees. In addition to participants in my line of work, or with similar areas of interest, such as David Blei (former colleague at WhizBang!Labs) and Kevin Anderson (whose career spans both the BBC, with some involvement with Backstage, and the Guardian, an organization that is not caught with with fretting about the past; and who blogs on Corante, for his sins) I met representatives (and survivors of) traditional newsprint organizations, individuals centrally involved in transforming news in the Web 2.0 world, academics with impressive access to the entire trajectory of media evolution, hackers and so on.

Given the rich range of voices, while we may not have solved any specific problems (despite Ed's closing remarks) I certainly feel as if we aired a reasonably good sample of them. On reflection, I stand by yesterday's summary: there is plenty of pessimism around old media structures and plenty of optimism around the opportunities that new sources and new forms of information, combined with new ways to filter, analyse and aggregate this data presents. Bridging the two positions, there is concern around issues of quality and value with respect to the nature of the content (that is to

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IBM Takes a Lead in the Mashup Fray

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:48:47 GMT

I remember (lo these many years ago) when IBM proved that the elephant could dance, and the name of the dance was PC. An obscure IBM skunk works in Boca Raton, Florida hatched this insanely great idea a personal computer made out of cheap parts from all over the place and two years later it became the world standard. Now I'm not saying that IBM's embrace of enterprise mashups is on the same order as the PC; but of all the really big IT companies, you'd think IBM would be among the last to adopt a technology called 'mashup.'

As I explored in this case study about a Defence Intelligence Agency mashup, the technology at its most fundamental addresses one of the oldest IT problems around: Delivering appropriate data in a usable fashion to those who make decisions. What's different now, obviously, is the Internet and the technologies behind Web applications and Web 2.0.

Industry Standard's Top B-Z Blogs

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:52:04 GMT

The Industry Standard has produced a list of B-Z blogs of note.

These are the blogs you won't see on the Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati's Top 100 blogs, or the CruchBase BloggerBoard ... at least not yet. They include VCs, entrepreneurs, coders, experts, and observers, and they bring a delicious mix of insight, experience, and passion to their blogs. While they may not have the right amount of link love, they need to be on your radar screens.

I'm very happy that this blog has been included on the list!

Imaging: The Most Important Element of ECM?

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:58:59 GMT

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. During the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital, even though paper is clearly here to stay.

Future of News: Day 1 Summary

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:46:22 GMT

Had a great day of presentations, panels and discussion today at the Future of News event here in Princeton (which reminds me a lot of Cambridge). In summary, I heard both optimism and pessimism regarding the future of news. Things that seem to be of concern:

The collapsing of the newspaper model (which has had plenty of coverage) - though the Guardian's model was held out as an exception.
Of greater concern: the lack of watchdog journalism implicit in "decentralized non-market" forms of media.

Optimism was expressed largely by those who were actively trying to push the evolution of the space (the best way to predict the future is to invent it).

I was mistaken for a BBC employee - can I put that on my CV?

The Search Engine Miracle is Wearing Thin

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:57:38 GMT

Search isn't that great anymore. For one thing, it's become so commercial that it's really more like an ad search engine. SEO programs game the big ones to the point that you have to go to page 20 before you find something that isn't trying to sell what you're looking for. I want the Scotty Effect for myself (see my previous post). Why can't I ask a search engine questions and get sent to exactly the places with the answers, not 10,000 hits? Why can't the search engines help me assemble the information I need?

Tom Davenport suggests that the competitive playing field for businesses is analytics. I think we'd all be a lot better off if we could do some analytics for ourselves. What do you think? Here are some things I wonder about:

The HP-EDS Bulls Eye (and Collateral Damage)

Tue, 13 May 2008 23:30:27 GMT

As the mists clear away on the HP-EDS deal, it appears that theres good news in the making for companies that outsource their infrastructure, and not-so-good news for HP competitors. Judging from the technology analysts/media response, here is an early assessment of the impact of the merger

Reinventing the Java Application Server

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:58:49 GMT

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The recently announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

Worldwide Telescope

Matthew Hurst — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:36:24 GMT

Microsoft Research's Worldwide Telescope is available for download. I'd encourage you to go and take a look. I would have been writing up some details of it for this blog, but it is so easy to spend time exploring the sky and the planets that I'm left with no time right now! Note that it does provide planet models (including earth) as well as astral data.

Birth of a Behemoth: HP to Purchase EDS

Mon, 12 May 2008 22:26:57 GMT

News is that HP is purchasing EDS. HP was already marginally bigger than IBM, and now with this bold move, HP is looking to catch up with IBM in the lucrative Services sector, which provides a large chunk of IBM's revenue and an even larger chunk of profitability. In data management, though, IBM will probably continue to have a formidable lead for some time.

Brand Tags

Matthew Hurst — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:06:37 GMT

This is a great idea: the user is shown branding and asked to provide a single tag. You can then click through to see the tag clouds (which could be displayed a little better) for each brand.

[Via Nathan]

In Search of 'The Scotty Effect'

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:28:35 GMT

Do you remember the movie "Star Trek IV," when the crew needs to go back to the 20th century to find two hump back whales? When that movie was released, twenty-five years ago, we were already building pricing models with DSS software, we already had SAS to build models and do statistical work and we could write reports in FOCUS or any number of other tools. Compared to the things we can do today, this may seem primitive, but how different is it really?

Consider that the density of hard drives in the same period has increased five orders of magnitude, CPU speed even more so and the cost per unit of storage or MIP has fallen off the table. With that kind of improvement, a new BMW today would go from 0 to 60 mph in 0.00008 seconds, have a top speed of 15 million miles per hour and would burn gas at a rate of 2 million miles per gallon. Oh, and it would cost about 30 cents to buy. I haven't figured out the lease yet.

The IT Pro's Guide to Better Business Skills

Mon, 12 May 2008 14:57:07 GMT

Whether you want to advance your career or just improve your team's chances of success, IT professionals would do well to read this week's installment of "Kimball University," entitled "Better Business Skills for BI and Data Warehouse Professionals". The title notwithstanding, it's a great guide for any IT pro who wants to better understand the business, improve interactions with colleagues and superiors, and develop better communication skills. I can personally vouch for several of the 12 resources author Warren Thornthwaite suggests.