I have 20-some odd domains registered, all with NameCheap. When moving servers, it was necessary to change the DNS listings for all of them. There are three ways to do this in the NameCheap interface. For some domains, an option comes up to type or paste DNS entries directly. For some, there’s a different sidebar, but that sidebar gives a “Make Like Another Domain” option. (I have no idea why NameCheap’s UI is inconsistent in that regard.) And there’s also a mass update capability, for a page of results (about 9) on the Manage Domains listing.

I started by changing a single domain (DBMS2.com). Then I noticed the mass change option, and tried it. However, I was told it might take the changes up to an hour go through. (9 freaking transactional updates? An hour?? What are you thinking, NameCheap?) I also found that when I tried the DNS management option, on the sidebars that showed it, I frequently got busy server error messages. (C’mon, NameCheap — just how busy can your core servers be on the weekend? Or do you have such terrible backup practices that they are fatally slowed when being backed up?)

My websites broke right and left during the move, and nslookup indicated DNS problems. When I went back to look at NameCheap, and was able to ascertain the DNS settings, sometimes I found NO ENTRIES AT ALL. Even the first one I changed — DBMS2.com — eventually had its entries nulled out.

Eventually, with mutiple tries, I seem to have gotten all the DNS entries right. But I have to say that the NameCheap system is one of the most error-prone database applications it has even been my misfortune to contend with.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 is, so far as I can tell, seriously flawed. Specifically, it has been eating way too much of my work for me to happily keep using it. This has been going on long enough that I’m convinced the cause is not simple user error. The final straw yesterday was when changes I’d saved in a draft blog post (about Filemaker) weren’t there five hours later, with no intervening crashes, no messages about “Do you want to close w/ unsaved changes?”, and so on. Naturally, Microsoft (or rather the excellent consultant/expert they’ve provided me to talk with) has never heard of these problems before and is highly perplexed. Anyhow, I plan to keep using Word for highly formatted work – i.e., white papers and Monash Letters – but using it for general note-taking and blogging has turned out to be quite the mistake. (I guess I could go back to Word 2003, but now I’m intrigued by testing the cheaper alternative.)

But all glitches notwithstanding — Office 2007’s “ribbon” is one of the five greatest general UI advances in the past 10-15 years*. Just as the traditional Office menu/icon-row look-and-feel dominates business computing, the ribbon is likely to soon take its place. And deservedly so, at least in two broad classes of application: Analytic and composite. And those two, taken together, happen to comprise the vast majority of the innovation going on in enterprise applications today.

*Three of the other four, in my opinion, are:

1. The screen-division aspect of dashboards and portals.
2. Dynamic text-link navigation, also popularized via portals.
3. Search boxes.

The last slot is left open for personal-taste additions to the list.

The ribbon seems designed to solve two major problems:

• People can’t easily remember or find their application options.
• Different options call for differently-sized widgets and icons.

And it does a bang-up job of addressing them. Take a look, if you haven’t already, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s no one big dramatic aspect to the ribbon; rather, it just frees UI designers from the shackles of making all icons the same size and all menus approximately the same length. Now think about how to design any kind of query/reporting/visualization/alerting application. Do you think that kind of UI flexibility might be useful? I sure do.

And the same goes for any kind of composite apps. The whole idea of a composite app is commonly to create an overall quick-and-dirty system that exits to pieces of functionality of disparate systems. And the ribbon UI is ideally suited for controlling the Frankensteinish result.

1. A specialized application development technology. That’s what BI is, after all. Selling app dev runtimes isn’t a bad business. Selling analytic apps hasn’t gone so well, however.
2. An infrastructure upgrade. That’s what the BI vendors have been pushing for some years, as they try to win enterprise vendor-consolidation decisions. To a first approximation, it’s been a good move for them, but it also has helped defocus them from other things they need to be doing.
3. A transparent window on information. As Google, Bloomberg, and Lexis/Westlaw all demonstrate, users want access to “all” the possible information. BI vendors and management theorists alike have erred hugely in crippling enterprise dashboards via dogmas such as “balanced scorecards” and “seven plus-or-minus two.”
4. A communication and collaboration tool. Communication/collaboration is as big a benefit of reporting as the numbers themselves are. I learned this in the 1980s, and it’s never changed. But BI vendors have whiffed repeatedly at enhancing this benefit.

The Letter then goes on to suggest two areas of technical need and opportunity in BI, which may be summarized as:

• “Play very nicely with portals.”
• “Do a much better job of managing personal metrics customization.”

Good launching points for my other research on these subjects are this recent post on analytic technology marketing strategies and two high-concept white papers available here.

• Business Objects and Netezza have announced a mid-range BI appliance.
• Ingres is headed in the same direction.
• QlikTech is enjoying great growth for its fast-deploying BI technology.
• KXEN and Verix offer “easy” data mining technology.
• Search-based BI is trying to circumvent the data warehouse deployment process.

It’s about time.

I think there are lots of problems like that in BI, and what we need to do is step back and consider all the different kinds of BI that enterprises value and need. More precisely, let’s consider the major kinds of use of BI, because it seems that each calls for different kinds of technological support. Here’s one possible list:

• Early warning of situations that require action.
• Communication of company results.
• Deep analysis and decision support.
• Operational analytics.

Here’s what I mean by each category.

Early warning of situations that require action. This is the classic image of BI. People get reports or graphs on paper or on screen, see that some numbers are out of whack, and react accordingly. Dashboards can be a prettier version of the same thing, or they can be more focused on alarms and alerts. Nowadays, alarms and alerts can also arrive by IM, email, text message, pager, and so on.

On the one hand, a large fraction of the economic value in the history of BI has been generated in this area. On the other, technology for doing so is continually perceived as inadequate. I continue to think that KPI management, alerting technology, and so on are advancing much more slowly than they should be. Even the buzz around Business Activity Monitoring doesn’t seem to have accelerated things much.

Nor does this change when the warnings are the product of text or data mining. For example, despite a very interesting approach to generating alerts, at this point in its development Verix delivers them in uninspired ways.

Mainly, the supporting technology here is the standard query/reporting stack, including new dashboard/scorecard/alerting tools. It’s also the main place where data mining and text mining should be more integrated into standard BI than they are – i.e., to define and populate metrics and KPIs.

Communication of company results. Back in the 1980s, the conventional wisdom was that half the benefit of reporting tools was for actual analytics, while half was just for communicating among enterprise employees. That’s probably still valid.

BI vendors had the good idea a few years ago to build out their collaboration capabilities, but generally didn’t follow through on it, SAP somewhat excepted. Bad choice, in my opinion. The use of text search to get at BI results is something of a plausibility argument for my views in this area.

Again, the supporting technology here is largely the standard reporting stack. Portal/collaboration tools should be more involved than they are.

Deep analysis and decision support. Routine, scheduling reporting was covered in my first two categories. But this third one is where the bulk of ad hoc query and data mining fall. Generally, it’s where lots of specialized and/or calculation-intensive analytic technology comes into play. It’s also where the drilldown aspect of standard reporting shows up. Also, this is the area that is driving much of the recent transformation and disruption in the data warehouse market, because different kinds of BI need different kinds of data warehousing technology.

Operational analytics. In operational analytics, a small amount of analysis is done real-time or near-real-time, in connection with an operational business process. The most technically demanding examples are probably the customer-facing ones, such as call centers or personalized e-commerce sites. This is where the buzz around “active/enterprise data warehousing” is concentrated. There may also be interesting messaging aspects. And data mining scoring may be a consideration.

1. Data is assembled in a data warehouse from transactional information, with all the effort and expense that requires. Maybe more data is even deliberately gathered. Or maybe the data is in large part acquired, at moderate cost, from third-party providers like credit bureaus.
2. The database experts fire up long-running, expensive data extraction processes to select data for analysis. Often, special data warehousing technology is used just for that purpose.
3. The statistical experts pound away at the data in their dungeons, torturing it until it reveals its secrets.
4. The results are made available to business operating units, both as reports and in the form of executable models.

Each in its own way, KXEN and Verix (the imminent new name of the company now called Business Events) want to change all that.

KXEN believes they have found a one-size-fits-all set of data mining models and algorithms. This is not an SVM (Support Vector Machine), which they actually don’t offer any more, but rather something else from the fertile brain of SVM co-inventor Vladimir Vapnik, called Structured Risk Minimization. While the details have been published, they asked me not to write about them anyway for some kind of security-through-obscurity competitive reason. So let’s just say that these are not just the linear models they previously were or seemed to be stuck with. (For a small company with limited footprint, there sure is a lot of false information out there about how the whole thing works.)

A limited set of models lets one design a fairly simple user interface, especially when the models are good at helping one zoom through what otherwise can be annoying steps (like variable reduction, in which you choose which 80-90%+ of the data columns to disregard). Based on that relative simplicity, KXEN wants to let business users data mine directly, without being dependent on statistical specialists and their machinery. They position this as providing better results, because it allows rapid-cycle-time data exploration.

They also have a pickier statistical point to make, which is that their model-building process is streamlined and automated enough that it’s realistic to build lots of parallel “local” models, e.g. for each store or region in a retail chain. By way of contrast, in traditional data mining one would normally have one model used for all localities, but perhaps with additional variables indicating which locality the model was currently referring to. KXEN confidently believes that its way is superior, but in a recent discussion didn’t actually provide me with much beyond hand-waving to back that claim up.

I don’t actually have a good feel for how well these pitches are being received by the market. KXEN’s biggest sales successes seem to be via partnerships with various other analytics players, and it’s tough to judge whether that’s due more to price or to embeddability or to the fundamental merits of their overall case.

Business Events, imminently to be renamed Verix, is a raw start-up with a story even more extreme than KXEN’s: Sophisticated analytic results just delivered on a SaaS basis, with no thinking required by the customer at all. Obviously, this can only make sense if the universe of possible results is rather limited, and indeed it is.

Verix’s approach assumes a classical star set-up: A single measure/fact table and a complexly hierarchical set of dimensions. Verix looks exhaustively at time series on the facts, pulls out all series that are showing anomalies in two or more dimensions at once, and isolates exactly the point in the dimension network where the anomaly is occurring. If sales of frobalizing widgets in Houston are off plan, it identifies whether this is really a Houston issue or a Texas one, and whether it’s a problem just for frobalizers or – gulp – for the entire widget category.

The company claims that some insights you get this way just wouldn’t have been found by conventional BI. E.g., if frobalizers are down in Houston but up in Dallas, and the analysis stopped at Texas, nobody (not even the Houston district manager?) would ever know of the great Houstonian frobalizer downturn.

The company sounds like they’re working on all the right things to generalize this model. Initial interest in what they have seems to be concentrated in the pharmaceutical and CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry, although there are a couple of paying telecom customers as well. One thing pharma and CPG have in common is that a lot of your raw data comes from third parties, such as IMS, and so your sales data are visible to your competitors anyway. Given that, it’s easy to believe that the SaaS nature of the service isn’t causing a lot of customer discomfort.

And by the way, IT departments aren’t involved in the Verix buying process whatsoever.

Still, I feel something has been lacking, probably because there just are so many different UI subjects to talk about. So here are some quick-hit thoughts on UIs. The first ones are from my Computerworld column running next Monday, which is called (with apologies to Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King), Six Things I Think I Think About UIs.

1. “A good GUI interface” is the most important feature a product can have. In many cases, the GUI is the feature set, whether we’re talking about operational apps, BI, or IT administration tools. For example, when I looked into the security market a few years ago, it turned out that Checkpoint’s rise to dominate the firewall market in the late 1990s came about because it had a good GUI rules-administration interface, while otherwise equal or superior competitors didn’t.

2. Web UIs are now, finally, much superior to the client/server systems they replaced. That wasn’t true until recently. But now they’ve leapfrogged client/server a little bit in pure GUI functionality. (I somehow like this article on the technology, even though I’m not sure what I learned from it.) And they’re always been way ahead in application navigability.

3. BI look-and-feel is on the upswing. Business Objects is a good example of this. They brought their thin client products up to client/server GUI standards. They fiddled around in usability labs with screen real estate and so on to polish the dashboard UIs further. And then they went out and bought what is now Crystal Excelsius.

4. Portal technology is headed for a boom. I have a whole whitepaper in the works on that one.

5. Natural-language interfaces are advancing too slowly. Unfortunately, big vendors remain clueless about language-based UIs. Enterprise search is a fiasco. Most single-site web search is even worse; in almost every case, it’s inferior to just googling on search string + site name. As for natural language/voice command/control and navigation – we’re nowhere, Inquira and Sybase AnswersAnywhere notwithstanding. (I bet you can’t name a single user of either product off the top of your head. To tell the truth, I can’t either, except that I’m pretty sure Inquira powers the websites of a couple big-name cellular providers.)

6. Microsoft Office is a huge question mark. Office is facing a huge, if slow-moving, threat from open source. And the product has basically been stagnant for years, in that few users have cared much about any of the newer features.

Microsoft’s stated and obviously sincere strategy is to make Office an important window in the world of database applications. The Proclarity acquisition this week is surely part of that. So are the moves to make XML important in live documents, which dovetail nicely with the XML file formats of Office 2007.

EDIT: See also: You can start to imagine a world of Office as a business application platform,” Witts said.

7. In particular, Excel is a huge question mark. On the one hand, the BI industry is doing ever more to make Excel into a viable BI client. On the other hand, they’re trying to replace Excel as the data storage engine of choice — and in some cases even as the client — for budgeting/planning/etc. It does seem to me as if server-based planning is sweeping the enterprise world. So where does that leave Excel? Will it ultimately be anything more than a glorified calculator?

8. Home UIs are challenging work ones. Back when I consulted a lot to AOL in the late 1990s, I (correctly, it turns out) warned them that their client’s lack of functionality in areas such as email and browsing would get them into big trouble, because users’ expectations were being set higher at work. Now the reverse is at times true. Home bandwidth has caught up with work bandwidth, and webmail is in some ways better than Outlook. Meanwhile, a few websites out there are actually pretty usable, annoying clutter notwithstanding — and most of them are focused on consumer shopping, e.g. Amazon, Land’s End, et al.

9. Usability labs are crucial. Back in the 1990s, usability labs were new. Microsoft and Lotus and Borland had good ones, and Oracle hired Dan Rosenberg away from Borland to set up theirs. Other than that, there mainly were third-party consulting firms, or very primitive inhouse operations.

Well, I’m still not convinced that very many inhouse usability labs accomplish much. But I do know that whether it’s inhouse or third-party, you must use a lab if you’re serious about offering a competitive product.

10. Rules-based interfaces are too primitive. This isn’t really an interface issue so much as a functionality one — but as noted above, the two are inseparable. True declarative rules interfaces, which function with the same flexibility as 1980s-era expert system shells, are way too rare. Executing a set of rules in a set linear order is not the same thing at all.

On that webinar, I promised to post a link here to my whitepaper on third-generation analytic business processes. Done. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

The webinar was pretty fast-moving, so I’d encourage you to replay it if you have a bit of time. But if you want to know just the tippy-topmost key points, the list is something like this:

• Portal technology can play a variety of different roles.
• Portals can be like an inhouse Yahoo, for static pages and knowledge management and self-service types of apps.
• Portals can be the best framework for “secondary” or “ad-hoc” operational apps and business processes, as an even lighter-weight technology than composite app development tools.
• Portals are an ideal base technology for dashboards.
• There should be much more BI-based collaboration going on, and portals are the obvious enabling technology for this.

1. SAP is serious about SOAs and, in most regards, openness.
2. SAP’s strategy does not gladden the hearts of top-tier DBMS vendors.

I also dinged them for being clueless about how to succeed in text search, but hey — nobody’s perfect, and there’s still time for them to fix the problem.

One interesting aspect of their strategy that did not fit into the above-mentioned server-oriented post is their take on UI. They said again and again and again that it is important to provide a high degree of UI freedom in accessing the same underlying application services. (Except that they usually referred to the services as — no surprise here — “business processes.”) This is a reversal from their prior belief that a transactional screen — or a portal page — was sufficient for everybody.

In general, the enterprise software industry is getting a lot more sophisticated about and competitive in it’s work on UI. I should post about that soon. (The point has come up repeatedly in my work on BI, with SAP, Business Objects, and others.)