Andrew WhiteI received today one of those email “flyers” advertising “semantics and the enterprise”. The link took me to a site for the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference. I was intrigued about this flyer since the notion of applying or exploiting semantic web technology inside the enterprise remains elusive. Even at Gartner I was unable to excite our “semantic web” analysts with the notion of “getting more applicable to business” by thinking of how firms actually work! For too long “semantic web” has focused on how data moves across the internet, which, for the most part, has little to do with the transactional side of the economy and is more focused on either B2C or how information is shared between people. The level of investment and thinking applied to “inside enterprises” or “B2B” compared to B2C or the social side of the web is much, much lower.
I talked about the idea of a “semantic enterprise” about 6 years ago when preparing for a presentation at one of our Spring Symposiums, where I had the good pleasure of speaking with Simon Hayward. The “Connected Enterprise” (the name of the pitch; we would not describe it as the hyper-connected enterprise!) represents one of those presentations that sought to connect how firms operate, with how people behave, and many ideas linked in that pitch (individually not really new, even then) continue to come back presented as “new ideas” with a different name. I remain astonished at the lack of interest in applying semantic web to the enterprise. I think it is because most technologies believe that there is no real issue! But given the level of interest in MDM, itself not really a new idea (but more a very old problem), shows that enterprises do NOT operate with a semantic model. Worse, the connection between what a business can do with IT WITH a semantic model remains elusive and vague. That is the problem. Ever tried to talk with the CEO or VP of Sales about their semantic model for customer? That’s a sure way to leave the office quickly.
MDM is, according to one view, a semantic oriented discipline. I would tend to agree. MDM focuses on sustaining “single view” of critical enterprise information, and this looks and smells like an argument for mapping semantics across different systems and data stores. I wrote about TopQuadrant (one of the vendors sponsoring the event noted above) in Cool Vendors in Master Data Management, 2008, and this technology is very much focused on applying semantic web technology within the enterprise. This is not a plug for the vendor, but used as an example to make the point. I think the link between semantics and semantic web, and MDM, will increase. I think that’s a good thing for business.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Brian Schulte May 1, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I think you’re ‘spot-on’, Andrew. Having come out of the MDM world (with the scars to prove it) I’m exploring how semantic modeling and upper ontologies can help enterprises. I think there may be something here…
2 Dave McComb May 1, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Andrew,
You’re right, it’s been a long time coming, but it seems inevitable now. Business users want among other things a “single view of the customer” and are collectively starting to realize that that means they are going to have to deal with the semantic idiosyncrasies that have crept up over the years.
If you get a chance check our our web site http://www.semanticarts.com, as well as the Semantic Universe http://www.semanticuniverse.com
3 pawel lubczonok May 3, 2009 at 6:58 am
We at thoughtexpress have been busy with enterprise/personal management system for last 10 years. Now we have full on line management software that for example can and does run insurance companies end-to-end in the cloud. It is entirely semantically based – no programming. The advantages of this semantic approach is a radical reduction of complexity, democratisation – domain specific experts can express themselves directly rather than having to go through a complex chain of business analyst -> programmer, extreme agility and cost efficiency.
In the near term we are planning to go live with a service we call “global brain” (not sure the final naming as the proto name is a bit menacing
) So that enterprises can run themselves in it without having to have IT departments with no programming. They would exists in the pure semantic space and customers etc. would be guided by intelligent agents driven by semantics.
Final observation: knowledge preceeds process – e.g. biological cell.
Pawel Lubczonok
ThoughtExpress
4 Mark Montgomery July 22, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The semantic enterprise is in my view a way to achieve the intent behind the learning organization, albeit it primarily still in computing- but then that’s where many of the problems are sourced or can be prevented.
In working on the problem for more than a decade, we came up with a holistic design to address the systemic issues in the digital workplace environment. Given the level of interest in large organizations in the past year, it appears to me that one of the few good things coming out of the financial crisis is motivation to finally make the conversion.
One of our recent articles on the topic discusses some of the semantic evolution that has made it possible: Unleash the Innovation Within
http://www.kyield.com/images/Unleash_the_Innovation_Within_-_A_Kyield_White_Paper.pdf
5 Mark Montgomery August 22, 2009 at 9:47 am
Jennifer Zaino did a nice job on our system as well as semantic enterprise issues more generally.
“When the increasing load of data within organizations and their partner chains lacks embedded intelligence, and is neither interoperable nor interchangeable, it’s easier to avoid accountability,
assume credit improperly, and of course spend massive amounts of time searching for information, connections and expertise rather than delivering innovation for the organization.”
http://www.semanticweb.com/news/article.php/3835551/Could-Semantic-Technology-Help-Get-Your-Next-Raise