Profile of Doug Henschen
Executive Editor, Enterprise Apps
Member Since: 11/15/2013
Author
News & Commentary Posts: 1717
Comments: 695
Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of Transform Magazine, and Executive Editor at DM News. He has covered IT and data-driven marketing for more than 15 years.
Articles by Doug Henschen
posted in March 2007
3/26/2007
Rich Internet applications promise interfaces that are more responsive, productive and adaptable to various deployment environments. SAP executives Dennis Moore, General Manager of Emerging Solutions, and Andrew Cabanski-Dunning, marketing director for NetWeaver User Productivity Solutions, discuss the required back-end infrastructure, and they reveal plans for Ajax-powered portal functionality to be introduced at next month's Sapphire event.
3/22/2007
Business rules show up in a lot of apps. Call centers employ rules for routing, exception-handling, escalation and approvals. Financial services set up rules based on deal value, customer status and regulatory scrutiny. Security software embeds access security rules. And as always, rules are made to be broken, so developers ideally want something that business users can change without having to go to IT.
3/21/2007
As a writer and editor, I felt a twinge of guilt when I read Seth Grimes' blog on hyperbolic PR and "writers and editors who don't have the time, knowledge, and/or judgment to ask the right questions." Seth's last two blogs came about because a SaaS-model BI vendor served up what he felt was self-conscious PR overstating its actual accomplishments. But what's true of this startup company is still true of Salesforce.com and was once true of Google.
3/20/2007
A dashboard deployment blending reporting, alerts, predictive analytics and geographic mapping has helped the Richmond Virginia Police Department get ahead of crime.
3/19/2007
Northeastern University deploys Cast Iron's integration appliance to link PeopleSoft, DB2 and an on-demand sales force automation application.
3/16/2007
You might get lost in buzzwords if you read this week's press release on IBM's "Dynamic Warehousing" strategy. For example, "real-time" showed up at least a couple of times in the release. And my brain starts to hurt whenever someone starts using the phrase "unstructured information," as if documents, e-mail and e-mail are just blobs of text. What do these terms really mean?
3/15/2007
Competency centers are making headway in the BI arena, and they grabbed a lot of attention at this week's Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. BICCs are typically cross-functional teams that develop frameworks of metrics, goals and best practices that can then be shared with business units and departments throughout the organization. Here's what people are saying.
3/14/2007
"Process-driven BI" has been a big theme at this week's Gartner BI Summit, so I sat in on a presentation by Gartner analyst Gareth Herschel on "Integrating Business Insight With Business Processes." Good presentation, but I wanted to hear more about the direct connections with modeling and management technologies. The performance management and process management camps share the whole idea of a "continuous circle of improvement."
3/14/2007
Day Two at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit was nonstop, with wall-to-wall sessions and appointments with industry blue-chip and challengers. Microsoft, IBM, HP, SAS, Cognos and SAP, among others, weighed in the direction of their products and the direction of the industry. You can visit our photo gallery to get the big picture, but I'll drill down on some of the bigger deals here in my blog… starting with Microsoft.
3/12/2007
The Hyatt Regency Chicago is sold out and the ballrooms, breakout sessions and exhibit hall are seeing heavy, heavy traffic here on the first day of the Gartner BI Summit. If you read our "Summit Preview" there weren't a lot of surprises in Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening keynote, but he did share some original market analysis... For one thing, dashboards and scorecars are heading into the trough of disillusionment.
3/11/2007
Analyst-driven BI silos are no longer enough. That's the key message at this week's Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Chicago. Analyst Bill Hostmann details trends and best practices that are putting information and insight to work.
3/9/2007
I was surprised to read that Dave DeWalt, one-time EMC rising star and former Documentum CEO, is leaving EMC to take the reigns at McAfee as CEO and president. DeWalt headed Documentum during its most innovative and aggressive years... Meanwhile, EMC CTO Jeff Nick is talking up the importance of BI and analytics and says "read between the lines" on the company's interest in acquisitions.
3/7/2007
LucidEra, launched yesterday, joins an ever-growing list of on-demand vendors in and around the BI space. Just last week I spoke to Adaptive Planning and SeaTab, and there's also Oco. These vendors claim to be "the only on-demand… insert qualifier here" but there will soon be plenty to choose from, including spinoffs from some of the industry giants.
3/6/2007
Canadian firm Grand & Toy embraced operational performance management, but it lacked a clear strategy to bring the pieces together. A corporate reorganization now aims to put the horse before the cart.
3/5/2007
Strategy is what differentiates a company, yet nine out of ten firms fail to execute on their strategies. Performance management guru David Norton discusses the team approach to measuring and managing for breakthrough results.
3/2/2007
Yesterday's blockbuster announcement confirms the trend toward consolidation in the business intelligence and performance management markets. Here's a look at the impact on BI competitors and Hyperion products.
3/1/2007
Every BI and performance management vendor has come out of the woodwork to offer an opinion on the Oracle/Hyperion deal. I'm gathering those comments and will share a few soon enough, but the companies I'm really anxious to hear from are SAP and IBM (and maybe HP belongs on that list as well). Consolidation happens in every technology market. It only goes one way, and every big, stand-alone vendor ultimately has a price.