I am getting ready to speak at a conference for iLog users in Palm Springs. If you are not familiar with iLog, they are a French company which makes applications that are primarily used in the business intelligence layer. For example, they have a rules base engine that has a layer on top to allow their customers to easily manipulate the underlying rules without having to reprogram at the logic level. They also have a visualization application that allows an IT shop to create very graphical representations of data. If this all sounds complicated to you, I promise it gets easier.

I was looking as some news articles the other day and happened to run into a company that is offering an open source business intelligence tool. That struck me as unusual because the BI space has been pretty hot for high end applications and I had not expected to see an open source alternative there. Then again, I was surprised when I saw SugerCRM and realized that people were building an open source CRM application.

The important news here for me is that the tools that organizations can use to retrieve and crunch data across applications are growing quickly. I have been preaching for years that we need to improve the plumbing within organizations and it seems we are in a period of high adoption. A sure sign of adoption is when tools to do analytics and data representation move into the open source world. Sadly, the tools are outstripping our ability to figure out clever uses for them. I expect that we will soon see a movement in data management much like we saw in manufacturing with the Lean Manufacturing paradigm. In that case, a few people from Toyota pioneered a new concept in creating productivity on the factory floor. I wonder who will step up and create this century’s correlation. To do my part, I will at least offer a name – how about “Brain Gaining.”

Interesting site of the day is – http://www.polleverywhere.com/ – I have been waiting for this site for a couple of years. It allows a presenter to ask polling questions and have the audience simply text message their answer in.

Scott