Ahead of the Curve

Information-driven organizations adapt to diverse paces of change

Achieving the goal of becoming information-driven should be extremely compelling. By both automating and focusing data-gathering on critical business processes, efficiencies can be realized by streamlining activities. At the same time, critical information is put instantaneously into the hands of those making key decisions and running fundamental business processes. The result: unparalleled levels of productivity can be achieved.

Since decision making is rarely reversed in this model, it can be empowered to very low levels in the organization and is consistent from one individual to the next. Because of that, information-driven organizations will consistently outperform competitors – despite workforce turnover, changes in business priorities and new market demands.

Unfortunately, becoming an information-driven organization represents significant technical and implementation challenges today and into the future. Those include business strategy issues, improvements in data-gathering processes, data analysis techniques and the development of decision support tools. An organization has to make an across-the-board commitment to evolution before this objective is achievable. Why? While affordable, the vision cannot be achieved with a narrow view of the implementation challenges.

The evolutionary process must start with an understanding of the critical success factors of long-range organizational strategy. The leadership team must determine what defines success, what parameters characterize leadership and how the organization will ultimately be measured as world class. Once this is accomplished, the team must establish a minimal set of measures and make sure data is automatically captured to assess progress and success.

Data is often easy to capture, but information is rarely straightforward to extract from the data. This represents the next challenge – teasing critical information about the organization performance from data you collect without requiring a team of subjective analysts.

Once the infrastructure and technology have been deployed to extract critical business support information, job-oriented decision support tools can be implemented. Key decision makers and critical process managers need dashboards to perform at top efficiency. These all represent significant implementation challenges. Some are addressable today, some are not.

The technological hurdles are even more daunting. Data gathering and analysis will require pervasive technology that can search voice and video streams. Unified messaging and unified communication infrastructure will be critical as well. But the most challenging technical element will be securing information created in electronic formats – an imperative to achieve information-driven status, but also a risk factor.

Security may represent the most fundamental element of this picture. Security must be comprehensive and reliable. It must be certifiable and auditable. It must be cost-effective and manageable. Maybe most importantly, it must be transparent and frictionless to allow the flow of appropriate information to key decision-makers and process managers. At the same time, it must provide an impenetrable barrier to interlopers who may attempt to access your organization’s valuable information assets.

ProCurve Networking by HP has been focused on this issue for years with our Adaptive Edge Architecture. We are rolling out critical tools for implementing an information-driven organization through our Adaptive Networks vision. We’re in the process of implementing a Network Immunity capability. Later this year we will introduce our ProActive Defense Network Access Appliance. We are also bringing to market advancements to our Identity Driven Network Manager and our Wireless Edge Services Module, which will effectively integrate our security capabilities throughout our entire product offering.

Going forward, our Adaptive Networks will be capable of supporting the most advanced media processing architectures, application-aware networking and security capabilities because ProCurve has implemented distributed processing as a basic element of our most popular products over the past two generations.

The next 10 to 20 years will include startling advancements in the efficiency and capabilities of organizations to deliver value to target customers. Organizations that win and lead in this timeframe will start understanding their strategic imperatives now. They will build infrastructure and processes that can adapt to new organizational models. They will understand how they can deploy new applications and embrace new users more efficiently and more effectively than their competitors.

For network infrastructure, these organizations will find that ProCurve provides the most structural security and adaptability – without excessive complexity or sacrificing productivity.