The healthcare industry is obviously undergoing tremendous change, with new government policies and economics challenging the business models of insurance and managed care providers such as “Blue KC.” The transition is away from controlling benefits – that is, denying benefits – and increasing rates as the primary tools for managing costs. The future is “wellness,” or helping members get or stay healthy. “We want to improve the health of our members so that they don’t become ‘patients,’ said Darren Taylor, vice president, Information Access Division with Blue KC. “If we can do that, then we can take care of costs from within the context of that objective.”

Wellness requires knowing more about members, which means that the companies need vastly improved data management and analysis. Connecting to disparate data systems and establishing a single enterprise data warehouse (EDW) are proving critical to accomplishing Blue KC’s objectives with its membership. Previously, Blue KC had outsourced diabetes or other disease management programs “to good companies,” Taylor said, “but we did not have enough insight into these proprietary systems.” The company could not integrate or analyze multiple sources of data about one member to understand how, for example, their heart conditions, asthma or other issues were related. Gaining this single view is essential. With the EDW in place, the company is able to bring these disparate data sources in house.

Taylor was VP of the IT group, but his group now reports to Blue KC’s CFO. “There’s more accountability. IT is usually about waiting for requirements. We’re now about anticipating needs, and bringing business and IT together to execute on our data warehouse strategy.”

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The only disconcerting – but at the same time, entertaining – part of the cruise was what appeared to be a U.S. Navy SEALs training session going on all around us. Helicopters swooped low and gunboats raced by; as darkness fell, more copters lit the water with searchlights, putting the bay under close surveillance. San Diego mostly basks in sunny, happy weather, but overhead and out on the water, you see constant reminders of San Diego’s key role in the serious business of hosting naval forces that defend the country and project American power.

As expected, HP personnel kept their lips sealed about the continuing saga of Mark Hurd, HP’s former CEO, the HP Board and actress/marketing consultant Jodie Fisher. With media such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the blogosphere filling in details daily, it was hard not to bring it up. Some HP folks smiled guardedly in agreement when it was suggested to them that while the mess is not pleasant, HP might be better off replacing Hurd’s fearsome regime of performance accountability and tight spending control with more creative, inventive and inspiring leadership.

I couldn’t help but reflect on the excitement Hurd generated when he joined HP in 2005 after previously heading up NCR and its then Teradata division. When Hurd became CEO, he made it clear that he “got it” when it came to BI, analytics and data warehousing, both with regard to the company’s internal management and his strategy for HP’s software products and services. He hired Randall Mott away from Dell to become HP’s executive VP and CIO; before his time at Dell, Mott was CIO at Wal-Mart, where he led its successful and influential enterprise data warehouse foray. Hurd directed Mott to consolidate HP’s numerous data centers and data marts to reduce costs and improve BI and analytics.

Under Hurd’s leadership, HP increased investment in database technology, particularly NeoView. However, strategies kept shifting, internal cost control became the focus and NeoView did not have the market impact that HP once hoped it might have. A big challenge was balancing its database software development strategy with its ongoing partnerships with Oracle, Microsoft and other players entrenched in the BI and data warehousing market. So, rather than software, HP’s BI foot forward became consulting services and solutions. In late 2006, HP bought the respected Knightsbridge Solutions, which has become the centerpiece of its BI and data warehouse consulting services. An HP BI Solutions customer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, was selected as co-winner of TDWI’s 2010 Best Practices Award for Enterprise Data Warehousing.

I had the opportunity to talk to Darren Taylor, vice president, Information Access Division with “Blue KC.” I’ll write about this discussion in my next blog, which will offer some quick takes about my meetings at TDWI in San Diego. Closing out this one, it will be interesting to see if HP installs a new CEO with the same kind of vision Hurd seemed to have about the power of BI and data warehousing – but with more soul, and more consistency in terms of the strategic drive and investment needed to succeed in a tough marketplace.

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(Photo credit: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle)

The same might be said about IBM’s technology operations, which in partnership with the U.S. Golf Association’s Digital Media team stood the test of a massive number of virtual fans visiting online and mobile U.S. Open sites. IBM and the USGA said that over four million visitors came to the U.S. Open’s Web site, about 8 percent more than last year. This was the first big year for the mobile site, which had nearly two million visits. A major attraction was the “Playtracker” application, which enabled users to fly over the course and get visualizations of how the course was playing through heat maps based on scoring feeds. You can imagine the potential for future data-driven visualizations based on historical data about courses, players, pin positions on the greens and much more.

IBM’s technology management of the U.S. Open site offered a case example of how virtualization and workload management are becoming the essential ingredients of scalability, availability and agility, certainly for consumer Web sites like the Open’s. The USGA is no stranger to IBM’s virtualization technology; IBM has a close services partnership with the USGA, which includes running a variety of cloud services for the Association from its data center in North Carolina. When I visited the trailer near the Pebble Beach course where Web site and scoring services technicians were holed up, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the simplicity of the dashboards that offered real-time views of workload performance on a virtual platform of servers located across the country.

As John J. Kent, IBM Program Manager for Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing explained, virtualization is critical to utilization efficiency, enabling IBM to combine several workloads onto a single platform. “Virtualization basically makes the distributed environment into a mainframe, which has had this virtualization capability forever,” he said. Kent heads up IBM’s technology partnerships with other events, including this week’s Wimbledon Championships tennis event. Kent said that tennis is actually the more data-rich game, with fans already interested in analysis of “all the potential data points – such as unforced errors and rally counts – that can help you understand the strength of a player’s performance.”

In distributed environments, scaling up has always meant adding more hardware; with virtualization and cloud computing, organizations can avoid the long “cap x” procurement process and simply request more of what they need, and it can be made available rapidly over the network. What’s key, then, is to understand and monitor their workloads so that they can be optimized as demand rises and falls; then, organizations don’t have to spend on procuring enough servers to match peak workloads – but otherwise let them sit idle.

The other performance throttle IBM needed during the Open was to regulate content flow. Bandwidth is now the chief bottleneck; the explosion of advanced mobile devices in particular has moved users ahead of what networking providers are able to offer. IBM and the USGA’s Digital Media team needed the ability to make dynamic decisions about regulating content flow. “We needed to understand content demand well,” said Kent. “We were able to slow scoring updates, for example, if we were reaching a threshold in demand for content access and live streaming.” Thus, workload intelligence is critical to managing unstructured content as much as it is for data.

The USGA needs to provide a rich virtual experience on mobile devices to capture a younger demographic, which is important not only for the continued success of professional golf but also for attracting advertising on its Web site. However, as fans grow more dependent on the experience delivered by their mobile devices, it will be interesting to see if the USGA responds to pressure to allow those who attend the Open to bring them, which they are currently prohibited from doing. While there are good reasons not to have onsite fans working their mobile devices and interrupting the lovely hush before a player takes a swing, I wonder if the USGA will have to bow to the inevitable. Otherwise, fans might prefer to stay outside, where they can enjoy a rich, virtual experience.

But in any case, from an IT perspective, the key to victory in the U.S. Open and similar high performance events is clear: Know the workload and optimize it through the virtualized infrastructure. The victorious Graeme McDowell set a good example.

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Nearly every newspaper in the country has weighed in on what Major League Baseball should do. I think as time goes by, it gets harder for MLB to do anything as radical as reversing the call. I originally thought MLB should reverse it. It was the last out, and the pitcher got the next guy out on an even easier play, so the play in doubt had no effect on the outcome of the game. But now it has become a piece of history, part of the story of the game. Making a change now would almost be a different story line - it would be about MLB’s knuckling  under to nationwide pressure to reverse a call.

What the incident highlighted – and perhaps what made people so emotional about it – is baseball’s humanity. The game’s core judgment is based on human umpires; it has somehow avoided the intrusion of instant replay and other high technology that might “perfect” decisions about whether a player is safe or out, whether a pitch is a ball or a strike and so on. Not that MLB is anti-technology: There’s no way a game that piles up this much data could ever be without advanced analytics in the year 2010, as Michael Lewis wrote about so well in Moneyball.

And so, it is almost a religiously cleansing experience to watch the end of the game and take in the aftermath. It requires an acceptance of human fallibility, and a love of how graceful we can be in accepting that reality.

 The Imperfect Ending to a Perfect Game (YouTube)

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It was a very interesting conference, although my movements were limited by the fact that I’d thrown out my back not long before I headed out. I appreciate everyone’s concern and patience at the event regarding my hobbling around rather slowly. I did get to see a bit of the River Walk area of San Antonio, thanks to a nice dinner with Lawson executives and industry analysts, and it looked like the locale for a lot of fun. I wonder how many people fall into the San Antonio River though; I nearly did a couple of times!

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IBM has hardly taken Oracle’s jabs lightly; for example, it has responded recently with benchmark results that assert lower overall database system costs compared with Oracle/Sun systems. I’m not going to write about benchmark wars here, but I will say that as stacks turn into pre-configured appliances, apples-to-apples comparisons of price and performance get tougher. It is important to examine closely the specifics of what the marketed benchmark results are reporting: in other words, whether the price-performance numbers account for all software and hardware costs, just hardware or whatever. This is especially true for organizations evaluating database appliances that offer pre-configured systems that integrate software, storage and server technology.

My focus here is on how IBM, with its recent software and systems announcements to support its “smarter systems for a smarter planet” strategy, is aimed at changing the basis of competition. To be sure, IBM has been traveling in this direction for a lot longer than just since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. However, at the launch event (April 7, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose), you could feel the temperature in the room rise whenever Oracle came up. IBM needed to respond to Oracle, but there’s a lot more going on than a battle of database machines.

The April announcements brought technology substance to IBM’s long-running campaign to educate the market about why “the planet” needs to be smarter. In short, the context IBM has been articulating is that public and private organizations in all industries are growing increasingly dependent on the flow of data for everything they do. This includes the data tsunami arriving in the form of sensor data, online clicks and comments, surveillance and more. If they wish to improve processes, performance, customer service, market intelligence and innovation, they need to use data effectively and be “smarter.” This must happen with all information activities, including analytics and transaction processing.

The significance from a technology perspective is that software and systems can’t be part of the problem. Organizations need technology that does not simply add to the headaches of poorly integrated information silos, no “end-to-end” view of performance and prohibitive costs for scalability and speed. It’s not good enough just to deliver a souped-up database machine; the technology must offer something more, so that the organization can become smarter, not dumber.

Each of the announced systems (preconfigured for x86, Unix/Linux and System Z platforms) has distinctive features; those based on the POWER7 processor were the most impressive. However, the unifying theme for all was workload optimization. Arvind Krishna, general manager for Information Management in the IBM Software Group contrasted “closed” appliances with IBM’s workload optimized systems, which he said are designed to take on additional capabilities and flex to the workload demand so that the system remains efficient, cost-effective and scalable. IBM Research’s Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and vice president for Next Generation Computing touted IBM’s workload optimization leadership “spanning decades,” particularly in mainframes, and described ongoing research. IBM demonstrated how the DB2 pureScale Application systems optimize workloads for transaction-intensive systems, and the Smart Analytics systems do so for BI and analytics.

Pardon me for using political consultant James Carville’s ugly phrase, but to have smarter systems, it’s the workload, stupid. Organizations must understand their current and anticipated workload, and then choose the technology platform (or external service) appropriately. They must ensure that the systems they choose enable continuous analysis, management and optimization of workloads from the end-to-end, user experience perspective, so that as demand intensifies and more data flows through, performance does not suffer and costs don’t skyrocket. Move over, speeds and feeds: workload is what matters.

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This interview/discussion by Michael Krasny of two authors of recent works was quite interesting. You can find it as well by tooling around www.kqed.org. From KQED’s Web site, here are descriptions of the authors interviewed:

• Alva Noe, writer, philosopher, professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley and author of “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness”
• Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist, author of “Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom,” co-founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and former boardmember of Spirit Rock Meditation Center

\”Beyond the Brain,\” Forum, Hosted by Michael Krasny, KQED radio

(Note: It looks like the link above to the audio is not working; I must need a widget! Here is the URL.)

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Then, there’s identity surveillance. Law enforcement and intelligence services must deal every day with identity confusion as they try to work within legal constraints to find wanted criminals and potential terrorists. Adding complexity, law enforcement will need to determine identity not just from traditional data but multimedia as well; an example is this current caper reported by the Tallahassee (Florida) Democrat.

Identity surveillance and watch lists are rising as political and policy challenges. Canada and the United States are in the news here and here, tussling over implementation of Secure Flight, the plan to collect more passenger data for watch lists that will be implemented by the Transportation Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. See this Intelligent Enterprise blog from last June by Rajan Chandras for some background.

In the middle of all of this are software providers, primarily IBM InfoSphere Identity Insight Solutions, Infoglide (which is providing software for the DHS) and Informatica. In February, I attended the Informatica Analyst Conference and had a chance to talk to execs there about the Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) solution and how it fits with other solutions and technologies such as master data management (MDM). I came away with a strong sense of how IIR is opening doors to new business opportunities for Informatica in government, but also potentially in areas where Informatica has greater market strength but where identity recognition and resolution software has not traditionally been applied.

Identity recognition and resolution systems enable organizations to use data matches to gain a better understanding of identity across multiple systems. This could include not just individual identities but also networks and relationships: that is, who people know and how they are connected. The tools generally apply algorithms and rules engines to automate and systematize steps that would obviously take gumshoe detectives far longer as they seek clues, patterns and a risk assessment about possible terrorists, fraudsters, money launderers and regulatory violators.

When Informatica acquired Identity Systems from Nokia in the spring of 2008, it looked like simply a smart addition to the company’s data quality toolbox. However, it is clear now that the acquisition was one of a series of decisive steps that have turned Informatica into a more broadly relevant information management (IM) solutions provider. The Identity Systems deal was followed in 2009 by the acquisition of AddressDoctor GmbH, a tool for postal address cleansing and verification. And of course, Informatica recently made its biggest move early this year by acquiring Siperian, a provider of MDM tools.

IIR is an important component of Informatica’s complete MDM solution, and will help organizations implementing MDM gain the much-sought single view of identities (customers, patients, criminals and more) across multiple data sources. A key capability to look for in identity recognition and resolution tools is functionality in multiple languages and countries. Combined with AddressDoctor, Informatica has tools for locating and matching identities around the world. And thinking beyond law enforcement uses, global corporations with diverse markets need better tools for identity network analysis to improve marketing, billing, service and more, especially in this age of social media.

IIR can also help internally, given that data is often hidden in applications and obscure databases. A healthcare firm at the Analyst conference described how it is using IIR for operations between its mainframes and users’ 30,000 Microsoft Access databases. Finally, one of the more interesting technology pairings I learned about at the conference was the real-time application of IIR for “identity-aware” event processing using Informatica’s CEP engine Agent Logic. Watch lists and other espionage uses are an obvious application of this combination, but it could also be applied in systems for financial services, healthcare, retail and other industries.

In the olden days, identity might have seemed a simpler, more innocent matter, although viewing film noir and reading detective novels from the ‘40s and ‘50s might make you wonder. Today, however, there’s no question that identity is a complex topic that includes sensitive political and privacy ramifications. Software providers such as Informatica should be in for a wild ride.

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Up until the last two weeks, I had not been much of a tweeter – and felt guilty about it. I had Twitter followers and followed people. I even wrote about Twitter and its impact; but frankly, it had had very little impact on me. With my infrequent participation, I felt unworthy of followship. And when I did go to Twitter, it was joining conversations in progress and I couldn’t flow with it.

My Twitter awakening took place at the Informatica Analyst Conference, held on February 9 and 10. I attended this event – I was there in person, listening to many fine presentations from Informatica executives. As has been my habit for two decades, I opened up my computer and started to take notes, listening and watching carefully. However, it wasn’t until I logged onto Twitter and checked in on the hash tag (#infaanalyst) that I was really there.

Or not there: It was hard to decide whether being involved in the Twitter conversation was a distraction or an enhancement. It was sort of exhilarating, kind of like surfing, with a mass of water moving below your feet, or in this case, my fingertips. Yet, Informatica people were watching the tweets carefully, and while they did not join the stream, they were responding to tweets during their presentations. Sohaib Abbasi, Informatica chairman and CEO, even picked up my tweet about the role of the CIO and offered insights during his remarks.

Convinced that Twitter was important, I made a point of following tweets from the SAS industry analyst conference earlier this past week (#sassb), since I was not physically there. Many of the same analysts who were at the Informatica conference were tweeting from this event. Some tweets were matter-of-fact restatements of what SAS was presenting, as if reporting to the outside world. These offered narrative value, but given Twitter’s character limit, they couldn’t provide much beyond headlines. Sometimes the NDA (nondisclosure) curtain would fall and there would be silence. Most other tweets were a combination of opinions, humorous asides, kudos, complaints and half-formed questions. An ensemble narrative it was not; since I was having trouble following the thread, I finally logged off and turned to other matters. My conclusion: You had to be there.

Then today, I had a third type of Twitter experience. I participated in the Boulder BI Brain Trust meeting with Hewlett Packard’s Business Intelligence Solutions group, represented by John Santaferraro, senior director of Marketing Communications and Industry Marketing. This time, while not physically there, I was dialed in by phone – and was on Twitter (#bbbt). This tweet stream was more like a parallel reality; HP did not really respond to tweets as Informatica had, but the flow seemed more sensible because I was hearing the presentation in real time, alongside the real-time tweet stream. Of course, tweet streams are real time and nothing else; when I go back and review the presentation and my notes later, the stream won’t be there (maybe I could hunt it down, but I won’t).

In the analyst business these days, tweeting is obligatory, as it is for marketing and public relations. I’m initiated now, and will tweet more. But, are the tweets of any use to anyone not physically there, or part of the tight community of tweeters? I think the jury is out on that. Can you follow a hash tag and “be there”?  No, at least not yet. It’s more like archeology, where you piece together disparate pieces and try to form a narrative. In real time.

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The verb form of the word came from its use as a noun, which means “a shaft or pin on which something turns” (Merriam-Webster’s). The implicit meaning of the headline, appearing the day after Obama’s State of the Union speech, was that the Obama Administration was going to turn its attention away from the now-stalled healthcare reform effort and toward the economic problem of creating jobs. This “pivot” would be quick and complete, like a machine would do it. No angst or mess: Done.

However, given that journalists and opinion-makers seemed to have picked up the word directly from Obama’s strategists, I wonder if the strategists’ use of the word comes more from basketball. Obama is as we know a major fan, and he plays the game. In basketball, once you set your pivot foot, you can spin around, but you cannot move that foot or else you’ll be called for traveling. I found a good explanation (and coaching tip, in case you need it) on YouTube. So, maybe it means that Obama has set his pivot foot – perhaps he did so on the day he took office – but he has the ability to spin around to pass or put up a (job creation) “shot” when opportunity or necessity presents itself. However, he cannot move his pivot foot or else he’ll be called for traveling. The whistle will blow, and he’ll have to turn the ball over.

In the world of business intelligence, online analytical processing (OLAP) and analysis using spreadsheets such as Microsoft Office Excel, “pivot” makes you think of pivot tables, or as Wikipedia defines them:

A pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets. Pivot tables were created in 1979 by Paul Spinks. Among other functions, they can automatically sort, count, and total the data stored in one table or spreadsheet and create a second table displaying the summarized data. Pivot tables are also useful for creating cross tabs. The user sets up and changes the summary’s structure by dragging and dropping fields graphically. This “rotation” or pivoting of the summary table gives the concept its name. The term pivot table is a generic phrase used by multiple vendors. However, the specific form PivotTable is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.

Research surveys often show that spreadsheet users do not make full use of pivot tables because they don’t know how to use them effectively and are afraid of making errors. However, pivot tables are obviously incredibly powerful for seeing data from different perspectives and uncovering patterns that may not have been obvious when analyzing the data in a more limited fashion. Microsoft has introduced PowerPivot for Excel 2010 (and for SharePoint 2010); I found this blog, which does a great job of explaining PowerPivot, so I won’t go into it here. However, I will chime in to say that it is perhaps the most important development in BI this year thus far. PowerPivot begins to bring together the worlds of BI and spreadsheets: or, put differently, it enables users to have some of the major benefits of BI while remaining spreadsheet users.

“Pivot” was an important topic during my briefing last week with Visual Mining, the producer of NetCharts, a tool for developing BI dashboards and data visualization. The focus of the briefing was NetCharts Performance Dashboards V2, which the company says adds “Excel-like” table and reporting functionality. In the demo, I was impressed by the ease and flexibility with which you could work with pivot tables and the data to see different views – and not just simple views but glorious, graphical data visualizations. “We want to enable CFOs to move beyond being record keeping to being more in control,” said Tristan Ziegler, president and CEO. While the challenges faced by the office of Finance are a major focus for Visual Mining, the product is useful for other scenarios, such as contact centers, where there are many data sources and users who may be used to spreadsheets but are not expert data analysts.

Could the Obama Administration’s decision makers benefit from having more views of their data? No doubt. It might help them discover correlations between issues such as job creation and health care that weren’t apparent when they were totally focused on one topic or the other. And I don’t think you can be called for traveling.

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