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Achieving the goal of becoming
information driven should be extremely compelling.
By both automating and focusing data gathering
on critical business processes, efficiencies can
be realized by streamlining activities. At the
same time, critical information is put instantaneously
into the hands of those making key decisions and
running fundamental business processes. The result:
unparalleled levels of productivity can be achieved.
Because decision making is rarely reversed in
this model, it can be empowered to very low levels
in the organization and is consistent from one
individual to the next. As a result, information driven
organizations will consistently outperform competitors
— independent of workforce turnover, changes
in business priorities and new market demands.
Unfortunately, becoming an information driven
organization represents significant technical
and implementation challenges today and into the
future. Those include business strategy issues,
improvements in data-gathering processes, data
analysis techniques and the development of decision
support tools. An organization has to make an
across-the-board commitment to evolution before
this objective is achievable. Why? While affordable,
the vision cannot be achieved with a narrow view
of the implementation challenges.
The evolutionary process must start with an understanding
of the critical success factors of long-range
organizational strategy. The leadership team must
determine what defines success, what parameters
characterize leadership and how the organization
will ultimately be measured as world class. Once
this is accomplished, the team must establish
a minimal set of measures and make sure data is
automatically captured to assess progress and
success.
Data is often easy to capture, but information
is rarely straightforward to extract from the
data. This represents the next challenge —
teasing critical information about the organization
performance from data you collect without requiring
a team of subjective analysts.
Once the infrastructure and technology have been
deployed to extract critical business support
information, job-oriented decision support tools
can be implemented. Key decision-makers and critical
process managers need dashboards to perform at
top efficiency. These all represent significant
implementation challenges. Some are addressable
today, some are not.
The technological hurdles are even more daunting.
Data gathering and analysis will require pervasive
technology that can search voice and video streams.
Unified messaging and unified communication infrastructure
will be critical as well. But the most challenging
technical element will be securing information
created in electronic formats — an imperative
to achieve information driven status, but also
a risk factor.
Security might represent the most fundamental
element of this picture. Security must be comprehensive
and reliable. It must be certifiable and auditable.
It must be cost-effective and manageable. Maybe
most importantly, it must be transparent and frictionless
to allow the flow of appropriate information to
key decision-makers and process managers. At the
same time, it must provide an impenetrable barrier
to interlopers who attempt to access your organization’s
valuable information assets.
ProCurve Networking by HP has been focused on
this issue for years with our Adaptive EDGE Architecture.
We are rolling out critical tools for implementing
an information driven organization through our
Adaptive Networks vision. We’re in the process
of implementing a Network Immunity capability.
Later this year we will begin shipping our ProActive
Defense network access appliance, the Network
Access Controller 800. We are also bringing to
market advancements to our Identity Driven Manager
(IDM) and Wireless Edge Services Module (WESM),
which will effectively integrate our security
capabilities throughout our entire product offering.
Going forward, our Adaptive Networks will be
capable of supporting the most advanced media
processing architectures, application-aware networking
and security capabilities because ProCurve has
implemented distributed processing as a basic
element of our most popular products over the
past two generations.
The next 10 to 20 years will include startling
advancements in the efficiency and capabilities
of organizations to deliver value to target customers.
Organizations that win and lead in this timeframe
will start understanding their strategic imperatives
now. They will build infrastructure and processes
that can adapt to new organizational models. They
will understand how they can deploy new applications
and embrace new users more efficiently and more
effectively than their competitors.
For network infrastructure, these organizations
will find that ProCurve provides the most structural
security and adaptability — without excessive
complexity or any sacrifice in productivity.
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