Simple Is The New Cool

We've all heard it: "simple is the new cool".  It's true.

We certainly see it in the UX world.  Simple designs for human interaction.  Tell me what I need to do, how to do it, and make it easy.  If I only had a dollar for every time I heard that mantra... And when we consider the market moving to the cloud, UX is the major differentiation - and simple is carrying the day every day.

That last paragraph?  Double-down on it for mobile.

And we see it in system architecture as well.  Big emphasis on unraveling institutional spaghetti bowls of interfaces, services and business processes in favor of simple, straight-forward enterprise architectures.

Packaged enterprise applications?  Sure.  How many times over the past five years have we heard and seen examples of "reconsider your customizations"?

And let's not forget about embedded analytics that blur the line between business intelligence and transactional reporting.  We're making it simpler to identify and understand the information we need, rather than getting wrapped around the axle about how to classify the source of that information.

Everywhere you look in the enterprise applications world these days, it's all about simplification.  Simple is the new cool.

So how do you start with simple?  You start with a strong focus on the problem you're trying to solve.  What are you making better?  And, by the way, problems like "our company needs to sell more software/services to end users"?  Not the type of problem I have in mind here.  Think about a warehouse working taking inventory.  A college freshman attempting to register.  An AP specialist attempting to identify and analyze payables trends.  Those are the types of problems you want to solve.  Those are the types of situations you want to make better.

Get focused.  Simple is the new cool.

EiS at Collaborate 13

With Collaborate 13 on the near horizon, I'm hearing quite a bit of "Hey Floyd, what's EiS doing at Collab 13?"...the short answer is that we have a pretty significant presence at the conference.  Here's the long answer:

Sessions

Da Booth

Hey, you can't be an Oracle Partner and not have a booth at a conference, right?  So, we have a booth.  I'll even be hanging out there a bit myself.  So, if you want to see some cool reporting and BI products to compliment Oracle products...including the new Splash BI...come by and see us in Booth #1121.  We'll have the well-known Treasure Chest going as well as a drawing for an iPad 3.  And, besides all that, we can talk at "da booth".  Speaking of having a conversation...if you mention @eistechnologies in a tweet, we'll give you a free two-day reporting assessment.

See ya'all in Denver.

Collaborate 13 Teaser

Those of you who follow either this blog or my Twitter account (@fteter) know that I've been up to my eyeballs in new product development over the past three or four months.  You know that I've been using ADF Essentials in building that product.  You also know that my team at EiS Technologies is planning to roll out the new product on a Controlled Availability Release basis at Collaborate 13.

A few notes on the overall experience:

•  ADF Essentials has not only performed better than advertised, it's changed our development team's thinking about how applications are developed.
• Thanks to ADF Essentials, we've built this product from scratch in under four months.
• The ADF Design Patterns, the ADF Rich Client User Interface Guidelines and the UX Direct tools were huge enablers in increasing productivity and cutting development cycle time.

Time for me to shut up now and let the product speak for itself.  Here is a landing page screen shot from our latest iteration.

Take a look.  Zoom in. Blow up the screen shot.  Leave first impressions in the comments.

Learn To Live With It - Multiple BI Tools

We all want 'em
We all got 'em
Well what do we do with 'em
                    -- From Jimmy Buffett's "Fruitcakes"

Ok, admit it.  In the heat of all the enterprise business intelligence hype, your enterprise has purchased and installed multiple BI platforms. Oracle, Jaspersoft, Microsoft, Indicee, Actuate, Microstrategy, WebFocus, Cognos, Tablue, QlickView, Tibco...the list of players and products goes on ad naseum.  And, despite the multiple tools, you're still having trouble keeping up with the BI workload.

Hey, don't get flustered.  We're all in the some boat.  And with good reason.  See, the BI industry has a secret.  I'll let you in on it. Shhhh, keep it down, we don't want this to get out.  The deal is....the perfect BI platform has yet to be built.  Each BI platform has strengths and weaknesses in both approach and features.  Odds are that you're dealing with multiple BI platforms because because your end users have needs that a single BI platform can't meet, at least not in a way that makes consolidation of BI platforms a solid value-add.

But what about standardization?  Doesn't that make the argument for consolidating by reducing maintenance costs and add value?  Well, it does...so long as all those user needs still get met in a relatively painless manner.  Yeah, I agree...not gonna happen.  Great for textbook theory, but it seems all those textbook authors never dealt with multiple business user personas.

So, what to do in this Frankenstein monster of multiple BI platforms?  Well, consolidation is still a good idea.  But do it at the BI level rather than ripping and replacing your existing BI platforms.  Yup, I'm suggesting the BI equivalent of web application "mash ups":  combining disparate content in new and creative ways.  I've seen a few very forward-thinking enterprises do some great work mashing up content from Oracle's OBIEE and Microstrategy.  I've also seen good work done mashing up Jaspersoft and Cognos.  So don't dismiss this idea too quickly...just give it some time to percolate in your brain.

Oh, and about that workload you're struggling to keep up with?  Keep in mind that good BI, well used, generates questions.  Answers are delivered through BI analytics.  Now think about using those BI "mash ups" with a focus on analytics.  Hey...that idea has some potential, doesn't it?

Multiple BI platforms will be around for some time yet; BI nirvana has yet to be found.  We'll all have to learn to live with multiple BI tools for some time to come.  In the meantime, think about BI "mash ups" focused on analytics.  It may be the best thing to do with 'em.

Thoughts?  The comments are at your service.