• This top 10 list on best practices for data integration is pretty lacking in the joke department, and there’s no celebrity/politician reading it to you, but we bet Letterman never taught you a thing about data management discipline.
• We’re not sure these are the “6 most important bits of advice for CIOs,” but they do make a nice refresher checklist.
• A little bird told us you’re not so good with the Twitter. Before everyone else finds out and assigns you embarrassing hash tags, check out these four tips on becoming a 140-character-thought leader.
• Think all that Twitter and social media stuff is silly? Bayer’s MaterialScience CIO Kurt De Ruwe would beg to differ.
• And finally, an insightful take from the trenches on how the antivirus industry failed in the face of Flame and Stuxnet.

1. 45% of firms plan budget increases of 5% or more on mobile apps and mobile middleware, outpacing business intelligence (43%) and security (40%), the other two top spending priorities. That’s a measurable change from last year’s survey, when between 36% and 39% of firms planned to boost mobile spending on apps and middleware by 5% or more.
2. On the hardware side, increased spending on tablets was on the agenda for 44% of firms, just ahead of storage products (43%) and server hardware (41%).

The figures are based on responses from IT executives and technology decision makers at 3,752 enterprise and SMB firms surveyed by Forrester from October to December 2011.

Trumps cloud
There are other signs that mobile is where CIO minds are at these days. Despite the ongoing hype around cloud, spending on cloud-based services like SaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) accounts for less than 5% of IT budgets. Full-time IT staff continues to take the biggest chunk of IT budgets (27%).

The report notes that the increased spending on mobile software and hardware is not just about the money. Mobile computing and consumerism signal a major shift away from IT departments as the commanders-in-chief of technology to the rising role employees play in tech decisions. According to the report, 23% of the IT leaders polled said their business groups wanted to be more involved in IT decisions about technology in 2011, compared with just 6% who saw a decrease in business involvement.

Frankly, based on our reporting on mobility and the consumerization of IT over the past two years, that 23% seems low. CIOs like Rick Roy, just to name but one of the mobile pioneers profiled in our CIO Innovator series, caught the shift early. His meticulously plotted strategy to mobilize CUNA Mutual Group included developing 18 different personas to pinpoint the mobile needs of the insurance company’s 4,000 employees.

What piques my interest lately is not mobile spending, although it is always useful to follow the money. (Or, for that matter, how employees are influencing tech decisions. Old news.) I want to know how CIOs are using their mobile dollars to transform business models at their companies — and in the process maybe even rendering the competition’s models obsolete.

Mobile computing is disrupting tried-and-true business models and centuries-old establishments. The seeds are being planted right now. The decision by Harvard and MIT to offer courses available to anyone who has a phone with an Internet connection is just one recent example. I’d like to hear how you think mobile spending is going to shake up your business. Let me know.

Companies might still need to know what they did last year or just a minute ago. The real money, however, is in predicting what is likely to happen in the next minute (or milliseconds, if you’re in financial services) and prescribing a fruitful course of action. For that, companies need to understand and be able to use analytics technology. Indeed, the promise of the Business Intelligence Summit, to quote the brochure, was to provide insight into “the latest analytic applications and information management trends” and into many other topics relevant to achieving analytics excellence.

Latency in L.A.

Yet right from the start, there was evidence of attendees wanting more on BI and analytics technology than the conference could provide. Take, for example, the BI expert from ExxonMobil who walked out of the opening day keynote with me. He was dismayed that time was being spent on an historical review of BI (including having Howard Dresner, the coiner of the term if not the inventor of BI, on stage for a bow) or, for that matter, on a description of analytics, when everybody knows, “The real story is how the cloud is changing BI.” Why weren’t they talking about migration strategies to the cloud? Well, I knew of at least one session coming up the next day on cloud, and there were probably others on the agenda, but clearly that wasn’t soon enough for him.

Later in the day, in a session with the come-hither title of “Mobile BI — Finally!” an audience member actually called out the speaker for presenting old news about mobile BI deployments. The outburst referred to the presenter’s example of an unnamed Canadian hospital deploying real-time BI in clinical settings via iPads. “This is already happening now!” the man said impatiently. Yes, of course, it is already happening, the analyst agreed, and proceeded to decode his own slide. But the attendee’s illogical remark only underscored the problem: Tell me something I don’t know, he was saying. Tell me something I haven’t already heard.

Interestingly, the conference leaders seemed to be aware of the problem — of our losing race to stay ahead of technology. The closing guest keynote was a talk on “How Algorithms Shape Our World” by Kevin Slater. Identified in the brochure as an “entrepreneur, provocateur and raconteur,” Slater talked about how computers are the nervous systems of a networked world. Computers — or rather, the algorithms that live within them — are not just quantifying and stitching together information. They’re actually determining our world: carving underground fiber highways between New York and Chicago so Wall Street can trade faster and make yet more money; forcing journalists to lard their stories — shape the news — with text optimized for search engines (for example, analytics technology) that search engines will pick up.

I don’t know that Mr. Slater said anything that anybody in this audience of highly sophisticated technocrats didn’t know. But he made the point in a way I would guess that many attendees had not heard before: He delivered a poetic meditation on the new ways in which contemporary math is coding ideas of the world and making them real. And here’s the scary part: In many instances, it is coding the world without human supervision, in ways that we can’t read, at least not fast enough. What he didn’t quite say, but what is obvious, is that the chasm between human understanding and the algorithms that run our lives is only going to widen from here on out.

But is concern about data quality misplaced? There are at least two competing theories about this: what I’ll call the old school view and the big data movement. The old school view is that data quality matters: garbage in, garbage out. Thus, time is spent on data cleansing, extracting, transforming and so forth, and the strong belief is that this is time well-spent.

The big data movement has spawned a different worldview on data quality: the bigger, the better. The central idea here is that data-crunching in itself is cleansing. Things that don’t fit into the data model are like flotsam and jetsam — an insignificant, superficial layer on your deep ocean of insight.

In the real world, I’m finding that CIOs understand the big data quality perspective — and some would like to embrace it — but the old school wins out. And that’s not because these CIOs are risk-averse. Case in point is Greg Taffet, CIO at U.S. Gas & Electric, a Miami-based reseller of gas and electricity. The fast-growing company has doubled in size in every one of the last four years that Taffet has been there. Not that he’s complaining. He’s one of those CIOs who like to be where the action is. “I was previously the CIO and employee No. 4 at MXenergy, and left when it hit $1 billion in revenue. I was recruited here to do the same,” he said.

But the ever-changing business fundamentals make building “a real BI environment,” as he puts it, particularly challenging. When it comes to data quality, Taffet is definitely old-school: “The tools are really not that distinguishable. We have to know our business. We have to get into the minds of the executives and the operational people, so we can set up the tools to do their job.” For him, data quality is the bedrock of a real BI environment.

So, amid a whirlwind of growth, Taffet and his BI team meet weekly with people from finance, operations and sales to make sure there’s no disagreement about the quality of the data IT is collecting. “When we see something that is not expected, we drill down into the details and see if it is a variation on something that was not accounted for but should be, or something that should be taken out,” he said. It’s time well spent, he says, toward building that real BI environment.

But then Taffet’s not dealing with the volumes of data that qualify as big data — yet. “I still see that we have several years before we get hit with what we call big data,” he said. And until the tsunami hits, he’s sticking with old school. You?

Users across enterprises are not waiting for IT, the resident statistician or business analyst to produce a report for them. Instead they are asking for and getting access to tools that let them dig for their own data and create their own reports based on the needs of their job function.

Some call this self-service BI, but it is yet another sign of a much larger movement in which IT increasingly is becoming a services broker. Many of the CIOs we’ve talked to have embraced this self-service movement. One case in point is Owens Corning CIO David Johns, who predicts that the majority of IT services one day will be delivered through self-service portals at his company.

I’m oversimplifying here. IT groups are doing more than merely activating services for the user base. They are the folks who are making this user empowerment movement possible by vetting self-service BI tools, mobile devices and cloud providers, and integrating services with back-end systems. They are the ones who are being asked to make sense of the multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) contracts spread across an organization. As one CIO, who asked not to be named, recently told me, his company is attempting to put some governance around multiple SaaS contracts (bought by business units) because the costs are getting out of hand.

A key to successful self-service BI is balancing user freedom with the risks that opening up data access poses to the enterprise. Striking that balance is something that IT will always have to manage with each new grassroots technology movement. In the case of self-service BI, potential risks appear worth it, given the enterprise’s drive to use BI to make workers more productive, create new revenue streams and gain better insight into what customers really want.

• The New York Times piece on Target’s extreme targeted marketing via data analytics caught fire and was everywhere this week. Here’s one of the more thoughtful among the many takes on what it all means. It’s a two-part piece; you can click to see the second part at the end of the entry.
• And in the further adventures of somewhat scary and scarily innovative data analytics: a company that aims to cut down all that laborious search time and just tell you what you want.
• We don’t like the suggestion that CIOs are anything but this — however, Forbes contributer Perry Rotella offers up a trio of succinct steppingstones CIOs should consider in order to be recognized as “first-class executive leaders.”
• Here’s something you really don’t want your business to get stuck with. Aside from its vast time-sucking capabilities, there’s another downside to the very hot Pinterest website — potential lawsuits, naturally.
• Not to be confused with image recognition app Google Goggles, comes more speculation that Google will release reality-augmenting glasses by year’s end. Is this going to be one of those things we’ll question the point of, then find it becomes ingrained in our lives (hello, Facebook in 2007)? Maybe that eyePhone episode of “Futurama” is eerily prescient.

More to the point, the talk concerned how CIOs increasingly are finding new uses for the business management systems that have been in place for years. The need to make data more useful to the organization is in part driving this trend, said Bob Rouse, director of the Society for Information Management’s Regional Leadership Forum training program and professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis.

“CIOs are expected to make administration systems more efficient and save money for the company, but that isn’t enough,” Rouse said. “They need to make the systems and themselves more valuable to the company.” One way of doing that is by channeling more capabilities through existing systems, he said.

Doing this exposes CIOs to their true customers — the external ones — by improving how the business delivers services to and meets the needs of the people buying its products and services.

To be more industry-specific: Mission-critical systems that gather reams of data can be used to help farmers find better ways to fertilize their fields. Or such systems can help doctors avoid future errors by looking for mistakes in dispensing medications. “Existing systems capture all sorts of data that can be used in new ways to gather intelligence,” Rouse said.

As I was talking to Rouse, another conversation popped into my head, one I had with Jay Leek, vice president of international security at Equifax Inc. He was using his company’s and Equifax customers’ billing systems to identify fraud. By looking at billing systems data and working with the accounting department, he could spot anomalies. For example, he found that one company’s billing systems had been infiltrated by a third party, which was using the systems to bill an Equifax customer for fake services.

In another case, Larry Bonfante, CIO for the United States Tennis Association Inc., is using data analysis from ticket scanners that gives exact on-campus headcounts at the U.S. Open, to pave the way for additional day-pass sales. This equals an additional $1.5 million in revenue for the association. And as SearchCIO.com Features Writer Karen Goulart explains, Bonfante is looking at more ways to use mission-critical systems to generate revenue. One example is the association’s event management system. It is a coordinated public safety response system created for the U.S. Open that is now being shopped to other large-scale event organizers.

It only makes sense, given that the CIO increasingly is being called on to monetize IT , in addition to running business operations, mentoring staff, tapping mobile devices to serve customers in new ways, helping the business expand its global reach through the cloud or social networking …

Let us know what you think of this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director.

“If you think of big data as a belief that there is going to be a single giant data warehouse just as there is a single instance of ERP, and that this is going to be the source of intelligence and the driver of business decisions, then that attitude is on the wane,” McDonald said. “What we found in this year’s surveys is a shift to a much more operational or tactical application of analytics apps.”

“I’m not quite ready to say big data is dead,” he added. “But the interest we’re seeing is in disaggregated BI, as opposed to a unified, over-mined version of the truth.”

Cost is one of the reasons big data is disaggregating, McDonald said. Like the economics of ERP, the economics of big data BI — where the data is unified and clean –is prohibitive, especially as data increases.

The way his clients describe analytics is in combination with other business functions: analytics apps and social media, analytics apps and supply chain, analytics and mobile, for example. That’s in distinction, McDonald said, to the traditional view of analytics as a “corporate shared services capability.”

In this worldview of BI, the job of CIOs is to think about analytics apps just as they would about other applications, with an emphasis on providing practical business value. “A CIO who can demonstrate the use of data in formulating business cases, in sizing up business opportunities and in making fact-based decisions is providing business value,” McDonald said.

Sounds good, but that’s kind of the problem. I’m left wondering — as with so much in IT — whether the shift away from traditional “big data” BI to analytics apps for specific business functions is more semantics than “qualitative change.” And I can’t wait to hear the hue and cry from big data experts about how big data cannot by any definition be equated with traditional BI — not to mention emails from all those big-name BI vendors selling something called big data analytics.

When asked if SaaS BI is now mature enough for the enterprise, Richardson said it was. Adoption, while still “patchy,” is definitely under way. He pointed to data from a Gartner survey of approximately 1,300 IT executives: About 30% said they used or planned to use some form of cloud-based BI or analytics tools in the next 12 months. And while much of the action on the SaaS BI scene looks to be coming from pure-play startups, the growing acceptance of cloud computing architectures in IT has nudged established BI vendors like Microsoft, SAP and IBM to offer this model, he said. IT leaders want options, and they’re not necessarily looking for all-or-nothing propositions. To that end, SaaS offerings are not yet replacing on-premises BI entirely. 

“In the main, they’re being used to augment what’s already there, often for urgent tactical needs where this delivery model offers value,” Richardson said.

In fact, of those companies already using SaaS BI solutions, 37% said “implementation cost and effort” was a key reason for their adoption. Cloud-based BI tools do offer faster, typically lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternatives. But these solutions are not without their areas of concern that need to be scrutinized — security and privacy topping the list.

“Especially in an age of compliance, security and privacy must be considered carefully when evaluating whether to store data off-premises,” Richardson said. “Business purchases of SaaS BI and analytics systems can disrupt long-term data management, governance and stewardship processes recently put in place.”

Another risk to watch for? The unintended creation of off-premises BI silos.

“If data is now spread across multiple SaaS analytic applications, there’s a danger of firms heading back to the days when analysis was done in silos with limited connection across the enterprise,” Richardson said. “Firms must consider how, when and what data to bring back on-premises to ensure SaaS BI systems and the insights they contain are reused fully.”

Are you part of the wave looking at the cloud as a home for some of your BI tools? Maybe you’re already there. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on whether this is a trend that’s here to stay.

It certainly makes sense. Back in the waning days of 2011, CIO Executive Board Executive Director Shvetank Shah told us that BI projects were going to be where IT leaders focused their time, attention and money in 2012. In fact, he noted that this is what we’ll be looking at for the next two or three years. The focus on BI is part of a “megatrend” of projects shifting away from big ERP to big information.

A brief about Gartner’s study suggests this shift seems to be playing out right now. But what role will the cloud play? According to the consultancy, nearly one-third of 1,364 IT manager and business users surveyed in Q4 2011 already use or plan to use cloud-based BI tools to augment their BI functions within the next 12 months. A total of 17% said they have replaced or plan to replace parts of their core BI functions with a SaaS offering. What’s behind this? The key drivers Gartner cites are time to value, cost concerns and lack of available expertise.

So, as for the aforementioned assignment: I’ll be digging a little deeper, talking to folks who’ve already taken their BI to the cloud and if or when experts suggest you should too. One user of cloud-based business intelligence tools I spoke with today can’t imagine his company without them. Very pleased with what he and his end users are able to accomplish, he hooked me into an impromptu online demonstration. It certainly looks to be an exceptional tool for this food distribution company that does $3.5 billion in sales. But is cloud based BI right — and ready — to take the enterprise by storm? I’ll bring you some answers on SearchCIO.com next week.