FINDINGS FROM GIGAWORLD IT FORUM

GigaWorld IT Forum, held in Boca Raton, Fla., is the lead event in Giga Information Group's e-Business conference series. The event features "IT Driver" presentations by Giga senior industry analysts and advisors. These IT Drivers provide information and recommendations to help organizations gain insight on understanding, creating and implementing a successful e-Business strategy. The findings and recommendations from the IT Drivers included:

In "Services and Outsourcing for e-Business," Giga vice president Julie Giera and Director Mike Dodd described how the move toward an e-Business economy is changing the emphasis of IT outsourcing. Giera and Dodd recommend taking the following actions for e-Business outsourcing success:

• Choose suppliers based on the IT portfolio type in your own organization
• Understand clearly your outsourcing drivers
• Know that perception of "value" depends on IT portfolio type
• Negotiate contracts that define and fulfill business goals, such as cost savings, risk reduction, revenue generation, etc.
• Measure outsourcing effectiveness using appropriate metrics
• Understand that you are not outsourcing management responsibility

In "Data Warehousing as an e-Business Enabler," Giga vice president Lou Agosta stated that the secret to reacting to a customer in real-time -- which is necessary for e-commerce -- is to have already built a profile of that customer. As a result, it is important to use data warehousing and data mining tools and techniques to organize data from sources such as online customer profiles, free Web sites and free e-mail to transform it into usable knowledge. Agosta sees several trends in e-Business driven data warehousing:

• The convergence of data management tools and enterprise application integration
• The growth of the multidimensional database as the proprietary power user tool of choice when it comes to slicing and dicing data-mart sized quantities of data
• The limiting factor for data mining will be the lack of staff who understand it
• A consistent approach to handling metadata (information about the nature and location of data contained in a database) will be necessary to prevent premature obsolescence
• Query and reporting and OLAP (online analytical processing) will be assimilated as types of business intelligence content within an enterprise portal
• Constraints on networks, physical supply chains and the speed with which information can be aggregated and absorbed by people will slow the adoption of real-time data warehousing

In "New Security Models for the Extended Enterprise," Giga vice presidents Lloyd Hession and Steve Hunt remarked that, because e-commerce is designed to permit many diverse users across the Internet to access many trusted internal systems in an organization, security is strategic, not merely tactical. Hession and Hunt outlined the "four A's of secure e-Business" authentication, authorization, administration and auditing and their significance to the success of e-Business. They also discussed the key ways to reduce security risks, including:

• Use threat scenario planning
• Prepare for negative events
• Measure risk-adjusted return
• Consider privacy outside your domain of control
• Measure using appropriate metrics

In "Infrastructure for Reliable e-Business Applications," Giga vice presidents Richard Fichera and Colin Rankine discussed how e-Business has changed fundamental hardware system requirements by demanding better quality in a more uncertain world. Time to market, 24X7 applications, security issues and capacity planning are driving adaptations in partitioning and workload management, continuous and incremental development, new scalability methods and networked application architectures. e-Business data centers will evolve to include:

• Architectural flexibility
• Highly scalable performance
• Emphasis on continuous operations, with a special focus on eliminating sources of planned downtime
• More granular resource management, both in charging and in acquisition and providing the flexibility to integrate internal and external resources

In "Organizing for e-Business: The Data, Information and Knowledge Perspective," Giga vice president Daniel Rasmus said that in order for an organization to pursue e-Business objectives with rigor, they must examine their data sources, the types of sources, their relationship to one another and their quality to develop organizational "knowledge." In order to effectively transfer knowledge throughout an organization, e-Businesses must:

• Put into place technologies to allow for the continuous evolution of the business, its process, people and products
• Consider the complex interactions of an organization when answering key business questions and planning action
• Use technologies and processes that allow for an "organic" change in the organization, its customers, products, services, philosophies, etc.
• Implement technology solutions based on the problem or challenge needing to be solved

In "Internet Consultants for Traditional Enterprises," Giga vice president Stephanie Moore outlined what it will take for traditional businesses to enter the e-Business economy. Traditional organizations will need a mix of skills, from strategy to creative to integration to maintenance. According to Moore, it will be highly unlikely that any single consultant will be able to offer all of these services. In selecting and working with a consultant, Moore suggests:

• Beware of extraordinary sales claims
• Insist on technical experts in preliminary meetings
• Know what you need (even if you need help with that)
• Never cede control to the consultants
• Insist on references and resumes

These GigaWorld IT Driver presentations will be featured in Giga Knowledge Salons on Giga's interactive client Web site, www.gigaweb.com.

Contact Kristen Reidt for Giga Information Group, 781-239-0057.