Earlier this month I attended the 2009 IBM Rational Software “As Real As It Gets” Conference in Orlando.

It was an inspiring conference full of belief and enthusiasm.  Jamie Thomas, VP Product Development, Delivery and Customer Support at IBM Rational, presented on the three drivers for increasing business productivity today:  Collaboration, Automation and Reporting.  I really enjoyed this presentation as it got me thinking about how inefficient many of our daily work routines are, and how much more fun work would be if we could improve or eliminate them.

As humans we are social animals, so we need collaboration to have fun, and the more fun we have, the faster we get more things done.

Collaboration

What is collaboration really? As I see it, it is all about 1+1=3. If we have the environment and tools to share and collaborate around our ideas and our work, employees (and their companies) will be far more productive. For LOBs this translates to building business models and business processes collaboratively, and being able to share any resulting data, process automation and insightful reports with our peers.

Automation
Unfortunately, there are still too many tedious manual processes involved in our daily work. We log in to supplier websites to check availability, search the web for the best hotel deal, or walk to and from our desk to type in data gathered at the assembly line.  Trivial manual processes are boring, unproductive, and inefficient.  We need tools to automate these processes. Tools that automatically log in to partner websites to check availability, search and compare hotel prices, and even wrap desktop applications into mobile devices for anytime access.

Reporting
Most business decisions are based on reports.  If these reports don’t exist already, we’re forced to create them.  Yet another boring manual process.  For example, we grab data from various business systems (company and partner apps and even info on the web) then we cut-and-paste into Excel to analyze it.  Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if we could automate all that data gathering and feed it in to a modern, sharable web application that could be built and modified as our ideas change?

I’d offer that we are more creatures of intellect than creatures of habit.  Let’s get the right tools to drive more collaboration, automation, and reports that can drive more business insight.

Any great examples of Collaboration-Automation-Reporting you’d like to share that have had a strong impact where you work?

By:  Stefan Andreasen

We thought our readers might like to know what industry blogs the Kapow Technologies team reads and considers to be the most insightful and informative.  We also encourage your recommendations on others we should check out as well. In no particular order, here they are:

BriefingsDirect, Dana Gardner
Dana is an independent analyst and forward thinking blogger who writes about software productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities. Dana is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and also a founding member and a weekly contributor to the Gillmor Gang podcast.

OnStrategies Perspectives, Tony Baer
Currently an analyst with Ovum, Tony has been following the IT industry for nearly two decades. His blog focuses on macro-level trends and events influencing innovation in the areas of SOA and Web Services, BPM, BI, Cloud Computing, SaaS, and software development.

RealWorldSOA, Dave Linthicum
Dave is undeniably one of the world’s foremost authorities on SOA. His blog offers insightful and pitchy commentary on where SOA collides with cloud computing and other hot enterprise IT trends.

The Keene View, Chris Keene
In this colorful blog, Chris Keene, entrepreneur and CEO of WaveMaker Software, riffs on rich internet applications, business and culture.

Service Oriented, Joe McKendrick
Joe tracks the impact of IT on management and markets in his Service Oriented blog. His higher level commentary frequently draws on the musings of his fellow SOA bloggers, including Gardner, Linthicum, Baer and Michelson.

Enterprise 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe
A prolific blogger and Enterprise 2.0 trend spotter, Dion’s ZDNet blog covers the intersection of Web 2.0 technologies and enterprise IT. As an IT strategy consultant, he also understands how these different technologies can be used to drive real world business benefits inside Fortune 500 companies.

Business Intelligence, Howard Dresner
Howard is a veteran analyst and thought leader on all things BI and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

Column2.0, Sandy Kemsley
Sandy is an independent analyst and systems architect who blogs about BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and technology trends in business.

ElementalLinks, Brenda Michelson
Brenda’s blog is a must read for enterprise architects and senior IT professionals. She is an IT strategist and hands-on practitioner, previously having served as the Chief Enterprise Architect for L.L. Bean.

In Context, Doug Henschen
Doug is the editor in chief for Intelligent Enterprise. In his blog for the publication he covers the convergence of business intelligence, performance management, business process management and rules management technologies within enterprise applications and architectures.

Forrester Blog for Information & Knowledge Management
Forrester Analysts tackle a range of topics and trends related to the Information and Knowledge Management professional, including data discovery and integration, content management, BI, and enterprise collaboration.

CMS Watch Blog
In this blog CMS Watch analysts track the latest content-oriented technologies and trends, including innovation in the areas of web content management, enterprise portals, and enterprise search.

We received very nice coverage by Dana Gardner in his blog post “Web data gains some due respect as Kapow eases it into mission critical enterprise uses” at ZDNet.com.  Dana details the essential role web-based content plays in business intelligence (BI) and service-oriented and web-oriented applications (SOA/WOA), and also highlights the need for fast and easy integration of the data.  Great article, Dana!

By:  Stefan Andreasen

I just read a very interesting article on “How New Intelligence Will Tame The Information Explosion” on CNBC.com. The article written by Steve LaValle and Jim Bramante from IBM describes how one in three business leaders cannot make the right decision. The reason? According to LaValle and Bramante, even though there is an abundance of information around, there is scarcity in getting the right data at the right time for making good decisions.

“New Intelligence” is vital for today’s CEO and other decision makers to make agile and accurate decisions. It’s simply impossible to drive a company to success based on intuition and a closed group of advisers.  You need to assemble the right proof points, analyze them, and make your move.  And this can’t be a one-off effort.  You need to build it into your management process to continuously have your finger on the pulse, ready to alter your business direction at any given moment.

Two critical components necessary for “New Intelligence”

First (and most important): the data. No decision-making is better than the data behind it.

Second:  Analyzing and reporting of the data. Fortunately, there is an ever growing set of very good analysis and reporting tools on the market today. Products from large companies like IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, Microsoft Fast, Autonomy, as well as numerous pure-play vendors like ClaraBridge, Corda, Attensity, and QlikTech.

One source of data that has become increasingly important today is web data. By web data I specifically mean data from public websites, including those of your competitors as well as from business partners.

Most web data is hidden behind a human browser interface and inaccessible by traditional enterprise applications. As a result, companies have been doing either manual cut-and-paste of the data or writing fragile “Web scrapers” in technologies like PERL or Python.

Unfortunately, those data acquisition methods are simply not scalable. Manual cut-and-paste can only access a fraction of the needed data while “Web scrapers” can only deal with static HTML pages and are insufficient to address the increasing amount of JavaScript and AJAX powered sites.

This is exactly what we have addressed at Kapow Technologies with the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0, the newest release of our flagship product. Using our proprietary, scalable, HTML parser and JavaScript engine in a point-and-click development environment, it is now a breeze to extract or service-enable any web data, even behind the most complex and dynamic web applications. Typically, it only takes as much effort and time as it would to click through a website once. After that, all the critical web data is automatically collected or accessed to empower your critical business decisions and drive your business forward.

I encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Hi.  I’m Stefan Andreasen, Founder and CTO at Kapow Technologies and now, I’m happy to say, Chief Blogger.  I’m very excited to launch our Web Data Services blog and welcome you to join in and share your views and feedback.

This is the place where I’ll be expressing my insights and perspectives to what happens in the industry around Web Data Services – new and interesting technologies in the market and how companies are working with internal and external Web data to optimize processes, improve innovation and make better and faster business decisions.

We will also give feedback to industry experts, discuss interesting industry news and events and most importantly, relay what we learn from meeting with our hundreds of customers around the world and interacting with many of you at various industry events.

All this to hopefully inspire you to find new and more productive ways to solve many of the IT and business challenges we all face in today’s competitive global economy.

Joining me on this blog will be our CEO, John Yapaola, and VP of Marketing, Ron Yu.  Please help us make this an engaging and inspiring knowledge base around Web Data Services. We welcome your comments and look forward to hearing from you.

Once again, Welcome!

By:  Stefan Andreasen