6. E-MAIL
Stopping the Flood
E-mail is a lousy business tool. Less secure than a postcard, it takes up valuable time as staff sift the wheat from the chaff, only to hide the wheat in a swamp of poorly organized in-boxes. In short, E-mail is the curse of the modern corporations, except for one thing: it is an integral part of the way business is done. In fact, the failure of expensive knowledge management systems is proof that attempts to wean employees off person-to-person tools like the telephone and now E-mail, are doomed.
Instead of fighting the inevitable, a number of innovative companies are putting a new spin on the Internet's killer application. UK-based DespatchBox, for example, offers an inexpensive plug-in to encrypt some of the 9 billion unprotected E-mail messages currently sent around the world each day. Another British company, K-Vault Software, sells an E-mail archiving software, which was originally developed at computer maker Compaq. The software works with Microsoft Exchange, the world's most popular E-mail system, to build a fully searchable repository for E-mail and E-mail attachments.
If companies need any more incentive to get their E-mail systems in order, the increasing use of text messaging in businesses provides it. Already well established in the mobile consumer world, text messaging will add another pile of entries to employees' in-boxes. To avoid letting even more "knowledge capital" seep out of their business, companies will need to bring knowledge management to the tools people actually use, rather than vice versa.
7. COLLABORATIVE COMMERCE
The New ERP
Collaborative commerce (or C-commerce) has as many meanings as there are analysts and vendors with an interest in defining it. An alternative way of getting to grips with the concept, however, is to take a quick look at the history of enterprise software.
Beginning in the early 1990s, enterprise-wide resource planning (ERP) software took off as a way to automate the back office of big companies. By the late 1990s, B2B E-commerce was supposed to link that automated back office with those of customers and suppliers to form a "virtual" marketplace. The problem was most companies found they didn't want to play in an anonymous marketplace after all. They wanted to work with their old partners, but do it more efficiently by moving transactions and other interactions online. C-commerce covers the plethora of standards and technologies becoming available to support this need.
The building blocks are XML-based standards for linking computer systems, such as xBRL in the financial arena. To these, C-commerce adds a layer of collaborative tools based on voice, instant messaging, E- mail, video, mobile devices and, of course, the world wide Web.
For this reason, a C-commerce evangelist at JD Edwards, Nick Rawls, expects customer relationship management (CRM) to lead the C-commerce charge in 2002. Judith Dixon, a marketing manager at Syntegra, a systems integrator, agrees, adding that the aim is "client, product and market information, contained in CRM systems, existing in-house systems or third-party applications, can be accessed either at a desktop in the fixed world or via PDAs while on the road."
8. SECURITY
Unbreakable
The September 11th terrorist attacks forced companies to take another look at their existing list of IT priority spending. And if security wasn't already at the top of the list, it is now. That's led many experts to predict 2002 will see the rise of unbreakable security. The idea is that unbreakable security is not a single product, but a collection of related technologies that can deliver a level of security well above what might have been acceptable before.
One of the big securities technologies is smart cards, already familiar to many Europeans. Most retail banks offer customers simple versions of these computers-on-a-bit-of-plastic. Following September 11th, however, expect both companies and governments to show renewed interest in sophisticated smart cards, which incorporate biometric details such as fingerprints and eye patterns. "The need to identify employees, travellers and citizens rapidly, both to protect corporate assets and to return to some level of revenue growth in the travel industry, will be the driving cause for this movement," says Rob Enderle, a research fellow at Giga, a research group.
Corporate IT departments will also look to introduce unbreakable security to the back office. Information infrastructures designed to withstand any failure or intrusion will become de rigueur. There are already products that help on this front. Oracle's Virtual Private Database, for example, pushes user authentication all the way down to individual rows in a database table. So even if hackers break into the application level above, the underlying database will still be protected. Unbreakable security, says Norman Green, financial director at Oracle UK, Ireland and South Africa, is about reducing downtime which, according to Standish Group, can cost a business from $2, 500 to $8,200 a minute.
9. CONVERGENCE
Delayed Take-off
Convergence—the tantalizing prospect of carrying voice, data and video over a single digital pipe—has been topping the hit-parade list of hot technologies for a decade. Frustratingly, it has never left those charts for the mainstream. The year ahead, experts say things will be different. They cite two developments—September 11th and the launch of GPRS mobile data services in Europe—that could transform convergence from a nice-to-have technology into a must-have.
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