The Bloor Perspective: ERM, Microsoft wants Unix converts and our old friend information overload

This week Robin Bloor and his team consider the latest brand of relationship management, Microsoft's ambitious OS targets and how to deal with all that info...

As the economy slowly moves in the right direction, many organisations will be considering where to invest the frugal budgets they have been allocated this year. While the last 12 months have seen the emphasis placed on ROI for IT assets, the world is changing and will soon focus on the people element of the enterprise. Hot on the heels of customer relationship management (CRM) is employee relationship management (ERM). But the question is: is it worth it? Admittedly CRM hasn't had a good press. Too much was expected with too little effort. Monster CRM projects were planned but never delivered. It is therefore understandable there may be some scepticism about the value, or ability to deliver, of the next relationship management technology. The advantage ERM has is it doesn't need the great shift in corporate thinking CRM did. ERM solutions assist in the management of an organisation's staff through the integration of many disparate systems already in place. For many years there has been a trend toward the self-service HR system and the HR function has often been successfully outsourced. ERM solutions are many and varied but the functionality available covers areas such as training and development, appraisals, compensation, benefits, time keeping, scheduling, knowledge bases, information services and corporate news and feedback. Any manager reading this will instantly recognise the administrative chores that often take up most of their waking hours. So there is an instant win as they are freed up to manage rather than administer. While we're on the subject, it is also the administrative areas of organisations' operations that can be made more efficient through the adoption of ERM. From the employees' perspective, they have timely access to accurate information with the ability to maintain the information themselves where appropriate. Added to this, ERM reduces the amount of paper running through an organisation and the automation of tasks means the whole operation runs far more efficiently. This results in the organisation being able to focus on core business activities. So the answer to the question - is it worth it? - is a resounding yes, but with a few caveats. Any organisation considering the implementation of an ERM solution must remember the painful lessons learnt with CRM - an incremental solution is far more likely to work than a big bang. And, most importantly, ERM enables better management - it is not a replacement for poor management. *Microsoft seeks Unix converts* By operating across the whole range of server platforms, the advent of open source Linux has managed to blur many of the traditional operating system divides. However, the moves being made by Microsoft to win over Unix users have the potential to have an equally significant impact. Is Microsoft now ready to make inroads into Unixland after many years of effort to gain a foothold in the data centre? At the NetWorld+Interop show last week in Las Vegas, the company released a new version of its Microsoft Services for Unix 3.0 tool. Services for Linux is one of the least well-known tools the mighty Microsoft offer to the world. In the company's own words: "Services for Unix 3.0 helps customers by providing seamless interoperability between Unix and Windows for effective coexistence in a heterogeneous network environment, as well as a powerful set of tools for smooth migration to Windows 2000." In every day language, this equates to providing a route for Unix applications to be hosted on Windows 2000 servers, providing a potential migration route away from Unix to cheaper Wintel systems. The software allows organisations to run Unix applications, scripts and commands unchanged on a Windows 2000 box. The tool also provides the ability to wrap a Unix application in XML and move the application towards a web services-type model. At the same time as providing this migration path for Unix applications, Microsoft also confirmed it does plan to release its own 64-bit operating system capable of exploiting Intel's McKinley/Itanium 2 processors. By providing a fully 64-bit OS Microsoft will be placing further pressure on the big Unix suppliers, namely HP, IBM and Sun. It remains to be seen whether IT managers are yet ready to put their trust and, more importantly, their mission critical applications, into the hands of a company that does not possess the best reputation in the world for reliability, availability and manageability. *More than I needed to know* The quantity of information flowing into our businesses on a daily basis has reached an officially indigestible level. Research from Gartner has found 90 per cent of companies believe they get too much information on a regular basis - and they're beginning to feel it's affecting their productivity. The problem, of course, is the proliferation of the communication network. We have the internet, email, instant messaging, the telephone, fax and a multitude of portable communications devices all designed to keep us informed. But for businesses this communication is getting too much to be useful - and it promises to cost us a fortune. Gartner estimates businesses across the globe will spend as much as $30bn on information management systems this year alone in the hope of pulling us through this quagmire of data. But still it may not be enough to counter the effects of information overload. One of the biggest challenges facing an organisation today is filtering the good from the bad information. It's the classic signal/noise equation. We all like to get the right signals - and all hate the noise. But for each and every employee these are highly debatable categories. Gartner found, quite surprisingly, that the most useful information employees receive comes from personal networks, contact with friends and colleagues, and emails - rather than the finely tuned information source that is supposed to be the intranet. But how do you manage that? Computers are the prime facilitators of this overload. But what can you do to stop them? The perennial interruptions, the useless information - it's virtually impossible to tackle. On the one hand, unnecessary interruption, caused by information, can be scheduled through workflow tools. But that only goes a very small part of the way to tackling the problem. Gartner advises encouraging more social interaction - in cafeterias and lounges - but still that won't stem the flood from outside the business. The other option is some kind of sophisticated knowledge management solution - but no one has even figured out what this is yet so don't expect that one to solve your woes. Bloor Research is a leading independent analyst organisation in Europe. You can find out more at http://www.bloor-research.com or by emailing mail@bloor-research.com.