Enterprise Information case study archive

ei magazine archive

Volume 3 Issue 7 - Editor's letter
Welcome to 2007 – the year in which Web 2.0 will permeate the enterprise, according to industry watchers. That, they say, will deliver many benefits: speed of deployment, anytime/anywhere access to service and information and, perhaps most important of all, increased participation.

Volume 3 Issue 6 - Editor's letter
Three years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates predicted that by 2006, the problem of unsolicited junk e-mail messages would be solved.

Volume 3 Issue 5 - Editor's letter: Seek and you may find
THE TYPICAL user in a large organisation sends and receives about 85 e-mails every day, according to recent research conducted by analyst company Osterman Research. That equates to more than 22,000 e-mails per person, per year.

Volume 3 Issue 4 - Editor's letter: Seek and ye shall find - maybe
THE TYPICAL user in a large organisation sends and receives about 85 e-mails every day, according to recent research conducted by analyst company Osterman Research. That equates to more than 22,000 e-mails per person, per year.

Volume 3 Issue 4 - Editor's letter
IT HAS recently come to our attention that ‘Stash Yarns’, the knitting shop located across the road from Enterprise Information’s London offices, has its own blog. If you’re not an ardent handicrafts enthusiast who lives in or around South-West London, its contents are unlikely to be of much interest. But its very existence does serve to demonstrate that, when you start looking, a whole new world of social networking is rapidly opening up.

Volume 3 Issue 3 - Editor's letter: Don't believe the hype

Volume 3 Issue 2 - Editor's letter
A recent entry on the blog of JP Rangaswami, the esteemed chief information officer at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, summed up a problem that information managers the world over face: Rules that demand that particular information be bured, combined with further rules that demand its exhumation.

Volume 3 Issue 1 - Editor's letter
Getting Enterprise Information to you, the reader, on time every month is a process very much driven by deadlines. But this month’s issue, it seems, is more focused on deadlines and targets than usual.

Volume 2 Issue 10 - Editor's letter: How refreshing!
Public sector IT is often given a hard time in the press – and not without good reason. All too often, it seems, government IT project are permitted to run over-budget and behind schedule at great expense (and with little discernible benefit) to the taxpayer.

Volume 2 Issue 9 - Editor's letter
Every year, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen unveils his list of the top ten best-designed intranets in the world. And this year, the team at Enterprise Information was delighted to see that, for the first time, non-US companies dominated the rollcall of winners. These included European powerhouses such as O2, Vodafone and Bank of Ireland.

Volume 2 Issue 8 - Editor's letter
In recent years, it seems that planet Earth has been trying to get its own back on us.
The Asian tsunami, the 2004 submerging of the Cayman Islands, one of the world’s biggest off-shore banking centres, and the destruction of New Orleans will have tested the disaster recovery plans of many thousands of organisations, if they had such plan, that is.

Volume 2 Issue 7 - Editor's letter
Compliance is insignificant relative to disaster recovery and business-continuity planning, according to research by storage-management vendor BridgeHead Software. And, despite the widespread prominence of the ‘big’ US legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the results suggest that the more familiar and ‘easier to understand’ UK Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts are the other key drivers in enterprise data strategy.

Volume 2 Issue 6 - Editor's letter
The past few weeks have been pretty hectic here at the Ark Group head office. Not least our re-location to new digs and the flurry of activity associated with the move. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome EI’s new managing editor Graeme Burton, who has also taken over the reins of our sister publication Inside Knowledge. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing him the best of luck in his new role.

Volume 2 Issue 5 - Editor's letter
It’s hard to believe that the internet and associated technologies are only about ten years old. Indeed, a decade ago browser pioneer Netscape was still basking in the stratospheric success of its public share offering. What a difference a decade makes.

Volume 2 Issue 4 - Editor's letter
The need to search through oceans of electronic information dates back to the earliest days of the IT industry. Since then, it has fuelled the adoption of a myriad of different technologies, from the earliest, most rudimentary mechanisms for extracting fixed-length records from ‘flat files’ or hierarchical databases, via relational database querying using the Structured Query Language (SQL), to today’s sophisticated enterprise-search tools, capable of interrogating numerous corporate-information systems.

Volume 2 Issue 3 - Editor's letter
Another day, another enterprise buzzword. Well, several actually. The release of Gartner Group’s 2005 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle (which is covered in this month’s In brief section) has thrown into light three major themes: collaboration, next- generation architecture and real world web, which it says are vital to any forward-thinking organisation.

Volume 2 Issue 2 - Editor's letter
Ease of use, low price and software ubiquity are factors that have ensured e-mail has emerged as the de facto communication tool for business. With an estimated 35 billion e-mails being sent per day worldwide, the medium has grown from a method of quick and simple one-to-one communication to a broadcast medium with which companies and teams collaborate, share information and make group decisions.

Volume 2 Issue 1 - Editor's letter
A plethora of developments has seen taxonomies mature, in corporate thinking, from luxury tools to business-critical applications. Analysts and vendors tell us that content itself has grown not only in size, but in its meaning and definition across the organisation, and information architects have realised the need for business processes to change and adapt in line with this growth.

Volume 1 Issue 10 - Editor's letter

Volume 1 Issue 9 - Editor's letter
The most common project in today’s enterprise that has the potential to become a major headache is the corporate intranet. Most organisations of significant size have grown their internal-serving websites organically as the need or employee demand has required. This has led to a disorganised proliferation of myriad intranets serving the needs of specific users or business units.

Volume 1 Issue 8 - Editor's letter
Whether you’re a public-sector organisation that needs to meet the demands of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, a CFO losing sleep over section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or a financial institution that needs to comply with Basel II, the underlying message is clear – develop effective and transparent information-management practices or risk the consequences of non-compliance.

Volume 1 Issue 7 - Editor's letter
The UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), which came into force on the 1st January 2005, has introduced new rights for citizens to access information held by public authorities in England and Wales and will have a significant impact on the 100,000 or so public bodies discharging public functions in the UK. This includes all government departments, parliament, local authorities, the NHS, public-funded educational bodies, the police and other emergency services, as well as hundreds of other bodies such as the Post Office and the BBC.

But the Act is not without its critics. A hard-hitting report published in 2004 by Bob Phillis, chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, states that the FOIA is woefully inadequate for a modern democracy and that ministers should not exercise the right of veto that the Act gives them.

This view is echoed by Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information: “So long as this corrosive veto exists, ministers won’t take the Act seriously – they know they can overrule the information commissioner and cling to their secrets.”

Volume 1 Issue 6 - Editor’s letter
Welcome to the December 2004/January 2005 edition of Enterprise Information (ei). As you will notice, the magazine has benefited from a new layout that features an expanded news section, multi-part workshops and several regular columns. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome on board Kate Clifton, the magazine’s new editorial assistant, as well as several new freelance writers. Together, and with the help of the magazine’s invaluable editorial board, we will endeavour to provide you with a bigger, better, altogether more lively publication.

Volume 1 Issue 5 - Editor’s letter
Welcome to the November issue of ei magazine, which features a 32-page special report on information-management compliance. With existing regulations starting to bite and new ones imminent, we felt it was time to look at the compliance market and see just how organisations are coping. What does the term ‘compliance’ mean to you? Which applications do you feel are the most important components of a compliance solution? What barriers have you encountered in your efforts to implement a compliance strategy? We surveyed 455 compliance and information managers across a wide range of industries to answers these questions (see page six of the report).

In the wake of recent high-profile corporate failures and fraud, information-management initiatives are enjoying renewed interest and investment. To help shed some light on these initiatives, Simon Lelic, managing editor of Knowledge Management magazine, talks to representatives from some of the leading vendors operating in the compliance marketplace to find out which issues are causing companies the greatest concern and what can be done to resolve them.

Volume 1 Issue 4 - Foreword
No matter what income bracket they find themselves in, a majority of the millions of people who use London’s transport system on a daily basis probably won’t be pleased at the recent announcement made by Mayor Ken Livingstone that bus and tube fares will increase beginning in January 2005.

Volume 1 Issue 3 - Foreword
It’s the nature of news to be variously unscheduled, surprising, amusing and edifying. Sometimes, it’s a mixture of these. Sometimes it’s all four – an enticing combination I came across as we were going to press with this issue of ei.

Volume 1 Issue 2 - Foreword
There’s a park in my home province of Ontario, Canada that has recently been outfitted, courtesy of a local phone company, with digital wireless service.

This means you can now not only tramp through the huge swath of pristine forest and lakes that make up Algonquin Provincial Park and see loons, wolves and black bears; you can also send or receive text messages, e-mails and mobile calls.

You just can’t get away from technology, can you?

Volume 1 Issue 1 - A new dawn
It’s the end of an era, as we wave goodbye to CM Focus and Intranet Strategist and herald the arrival of ei, or enterprise information, magazine. The launch has been a response to recent developments within the content-management and portal markets. As companies look to address their information-management needs with a single, integrated strategy, technology providers are rushing to add functionality to their existing product offerings in an effort to meet customer demand. The result has been industry consolidation, technology partnerships and an influx of new and improved products, as solution providers endeavour to secure a foothold in the market.