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If you are a CIO or a CEO then there is a very serious question that you must answer this year. Will you be an analytically or a collaboratively-driven organisation? The answer to that simple question will not only frame the future employee desktop and next generation business application strategies for your organisation, but will also dictate the competitive achievements of your company during the next economic cycle. Sometimes the problem with being as big as IBM is simply that. At some point there are simply not enough marketing messages to go around. Back in October last year at the Information on Demand event in Las Vegas IBM's execs would have had us believe that next generation business applications will unequivocally be BI led with some analytics thrown in to boot. This was an obvious retort to a similar line of messaging from Larry Ellison at Open World earlier in the year. Now today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando we are being asked by other IBM execs to accept that Lotus Notes (the enterprise collaborative suite-platform) is the window to the corporate soul (the entry point for corporate information platform). Now while it is a compelling argument, in all seriousness what is the story and how must a CIO or CEO choose? One of the key drivers for the Notes angle is the close and obvious integration of the Web Sphere portal brand, and the necessity of a "portal" entry point. But also the rise of mobility solutions within the enterprise is an obvious plug for the collaborative angle. While Cognos and their competitors will argue that managers are driven by metrics, Lotus may correctly argue that it is the nature of the corporate employee to communicate and collaborate. And perhaps therein lies a glimpse to the future; a necessary separation of corporate portals between the managers who need to respond to metric movements in corporate data (some kind of perpetuation of the "executive dashboard"), and the rest of the organisation driven by the need to communicate and collaborate to achieve what are often disconnected or in the very least distant corporate goals. If that is the case then the clear link between the two competing positions (i.e. do we believe the BI guys or the collaboration guys?) is the ability of management to act on the social metrics of collaboration both within and external to their organisation. It is why social network analysis (SNA) must find its way into the Business Intelligence (BI) and or analytics servers from IBM and Oracle within the next 12-months. If there is a session at Lotusphere 2010 over the next few days that address this then let me know about it.
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