Building the information supply chain requires intensive cooperation among IT and business managers
How Did We Get Here?
Welcome to Intelligent Enterprise. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to you from the pages of our magazines. Some of you may remember me as DBMS’s editor-at-large in 1992 and as editor-in-chief from 1993-1996. I also served very briefly as a columnist for Database Programming & Design in 1991. After my tenure as an editor, I became publisher of DBMS to focus on the business aspects of publishing. This job includes studying the forces in the market we cover, and developing strategies for harnessing those forces, rather than being overwhelmed by them.
In planning Intelligent Enterprise, we identified three forces as relevant to our market and to our magazines. First, we saw how information quality defines business success. Knowledge about customers, markets, and business processes represents an organization’s key competitive advantage. Consequently, the IT professionals and managers responsible for delivering business-critical information have become strategic to the business mission. They must be proficient in both technology and in business.
Second, we observed how Internet technology makes information available to everyone and raises user expectations for easy access. From a user’s perspective, it’s easier to surf the Web to find volumes of data on tree frogs than it is to find an internal sales report sorted by territory, salesperson, and month.
Third, we recognized that many organizations have accumulated nearly 40 years of applications and data that are scattered among various divisions, departments, workgroups, and individual users. The integration of these resources requires prodigious skills in information architecture and management, application design, and deployment, as well as in Internet technologies.
Intelligent Enterprise responds to these market forces by helping organizations create a supply chain that delivers information to users when and where they need it. This information supply chain involves the integration of enterprise information stores, as well as the integration of application solutions such as data warehousing and business intelligence, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and scalable e-commerce.
The technologies and disciplines involved in managing the information supply chain are those in which DBMS and Database P&D have specialized for more than a decade, including:
•Transaction processing and information management
•Application development and deployment
•Middleware and data movement
•Analysis, design, and development
•Data-centric application solutions such as data warehousing, ERP, and scalable e-commerce
•Scalable platforms.
With Intelligent Enterprise, we carry forward this hard-won expertise and present it in a new business solutions context. As information has become increasingly important, the technology that delivers it has become more important. In turn, the managers of the information supply chain—our readers—play a key role in achieving business objectives.
Thanks for reading Intelligent Enterprise. I welcome your comments and questions. Send them via email to dkalman@mfi.com or via postal mail to:
David M. Kalman, Publisher
Intelligent Enterprise
411 Borel Avenue, Suite 100
San Mateo, CA 94402
Fax: 650-358-9855
