Ovum White Papers

Taking Collaboration to the Next Level: From the E-mail and Document-centric World of Enterprise 1.0 to the People-centric World of Enterprise 2.0 Information workers must carry out their tasks and duties in a complex and increasingly regulated world, and so business leaders, and CIOs in particular, must find new ways ... read more..

This Butler Group Technical Paper emphasises the how of a Master Data Management (MDM) programme. There are many different definitions of MDM. The one used here is aimed to help clarify the goal of the MDM programme: MDM is a combination of tools, processes, and people to establish an ongoing ... read more..

In the past, most organisations paid little regard to the environmental aspects of their IT or the way resources were used and consumed. Now, driven by increasing awareness, costs, regulatory pressures, and equipment disposal liabilities, more companies are looking to address environmental issues in their IT strategy, along with corporate ... read more..

This document reviews the state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market from the perspective of the specialised needs of organisations with all or part of their focus on engineering. We have taken input from recent surveys undertaken by Datamonitor as well as the extensive supporting research undertaken by a ... read more..

Model Driven Development (MDD) is the next step of abstraction in writing software applications. In the history of computing, each higher level of abstraction has offered improved productivity and ease-of-writing applications. This has enabled the creation of far more complex applications without increasing the project management work load, or conversely, ... read more..

The fact that IT and business processes are becoming ever closer can no longer be denied. In many industries many of the most critical business services cannot be supported without appropriate IT systems, marking high levels of 'IT intensity' (a measure of how pervasive IT is within organisations). This has ... read more..

There has been so much recent discussion around business/IT alignment that an outsider might believe that the requirement is a recent discovery. It has, of course, always been the case that the role of IT is to enable the business to conduct its operations more efficiently and effectively, and to ... read more..

Mainframe systems have become increasingly complex and with the shortage of experienced and appropriately trained staff, IT departments can easily end up running some systems in a just-good-enough mode, without achieving the maximum potential. But in doing this, such organizations are failing to grasp the significant impact that improved service ... read more..

This White Paper provides an introduction to the breadth of solutions provided by Progress Software Inc. (Progress) in support of the implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It provides the context of around the discrete products by Progress, some of which are described in Butler Group's Technology Audits. Breaking up ... read more..

Making better use of information has become a vital capability for organisations in all sectors, providing the foundation for improved decision making, effective yet flexible management control, and the visibility and integrity of business operations. Whilst information technology can support this requirement, it is less important than developing a clear ... read more..

The issue of long-term information storage can no longer be ignored or deferred, as although storage hardware prices continue to drop, the acquisition of more storage capacity does not constitute or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy. One need only look to new technologies arriving over the horizon to see that ... read more..

Project success is elusive. It is clear that making the right choices concerning th essential trio of people, time and budgets, will yield competitive benefits and help control risk. There are a number of initiatives taking place that aim to make IT management less of a black art, and make ... read more..

Windows Vista has been one of the greatest software challenges in history and has resulted in a completely re-written operating environment that has over 50 million lines of code. The scale and complexity involved in its development has resulted in a number of high-profile delays, with the first production release ... read more..

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is set to become an inescapable part of our IT landscape in a very short timeframe. Despite IT's dreadful habit of disguising simple strategies within meaningless acronyms, it is worth a few minutes of any business executive's time to understand what SOA is trying to achieve, ... read more..

Many organisations implementing ITIL as part of their IT Service Management framework begin with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). While a CMDB is a key piece of any successful ITIL implementation, there are several traps that are easily fallen into when implementing one. In fact, its complexity and asset-centric view ... read more..

In order to deliver measurable value to the business community, security services have to be driven by, and closely aligned to, business needs. The purchase and support of enterprise security technology has moved well beyond the stage where products are bought in simply because new threats have been identified and ... read more..

In recent times, the management of application access has grown in importance for most organisations. While this capability has long been a fundamental need, in the modern business and IT landscape it has become a key enabled for strategic considerations such as integration (within organisational boundarie, and outside them), increased ... read more..

Data Centre consolidation does not signify a move back to the centralized world of 10 to 20 years ago, but the adoption of a more pragmatic appraisal of the IT infrastructure, focusing on optimizing the IT environment to meet the demands of the organisation and providing a flexible foundation in ... read more..

Many organisations focus their attention on Data Quality wholly in the customer names and address area, but Data Quality issues apply to all business information and an end-to-end approach is required. This is challenging as the path taken by data on its long and sometimes complex route before its transformation ... read more..

The recent emphasis for IT departments on systems consolidation and compliance with information legislation, has led to a backlog of application development work which must be accomplished in an effective and timely manner. Addressing this need, significant benefits in both speed and development costs can be realised by deploying service-oriented ... read more..