Roman Stanek

Twitter’s latest iteration of its site is great, but  it’s abundantly clear that the newly dumbed down design is aimed exclusively at the consumer.  But what about the enterprise?  Does the new Twitter design mean that ultimately, there will be a second conception of the beloved social networking tool, an enterprise edition? Now, keep in mind, in this context “enterprise edition” does not mean a Twitter app built in ABAP that would require the user to navigate eleven screens in order to Tweet.  That would be the SAP version.  (They could call it “Sapper”, as in sapping the users’ energy and patience.) No, an enterprise edition as it relates to Twitter would include the following, while maintaining its user-friendliness: Corporate policies and policy management.  Unlike regular Twitter, it wouldn’t do to have employees lobbing grenades at one another. Comprehensive ... (more)

Forecast Bleak for Bad UIs

The days of developing enterprise applications wherein the User Interface is an afterthought are rapidly coming to an end, and enterprise software companies had better adjust. Steve Jobs and Apple started the shift, and while Apple’s products were oriented toward the consumer, the business world is now driving the need for user friendly applications. (Open your eyes and you’ll see quite a few Vice Presidents of major corporations showing up for meetings with iPads, not PCs. ) Meanwhile, business users, for the most part, remain resigned (or sentenced) to the tedium of navigating... (more)

Looking for SOA in All the Wrong Places?

Systinet’s founding CTO and my friend Anne Thomas Manes pronounced the demise of SOA a few weeks ago. Honestly, SOA lost its meaning for me on the day when good, old Solaris became the “SOA operating system”. But is SOA dead or not? I don’t believe so but I think that Anne and others are looking for SOA in the wrong places. Here is why: Part of our Systinet SOA pitch was this truism: “SOA is not something you can buy”. We believed that SOA didn’t come in a box and companies have to invest time and money to build it. And maybe this is the crux of the problem. What if the act of b... (more)

Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI

Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want economical Business Intelligence solutions and they will pay ANY price to get it. Nobody argues with the need for more Business Intelligence; BI is one of the few remaining IT initiatives that can make companies more competitive. But only the largest companies can live with the costs or the high failure rates... (more)

Derivatives and Transparency

Every time I think about the current financial crisis I come to the conclusion that the lack of transparency is the biggest reason why things got so bad. There is an obvious implication for business intelligence but even when I simply look up “derivatives and transparency” on Google Trends I am surprised by the level of correlation between those two search terms over last five years! transparency derivatives Tagged: derivatives, search, transparency, trends ... (more)