Q: What is Information On Demand?
A: Information On Demand is a comprehensive vision for unlocking the business value of information for competitive advantage by enabling organizations to establish and leverage trusted information to optimize business performance. IBM’s commitment to the cross-company Information On Demand initiative has resulted in a comprehensive portfolio of software, services, hardware and industry-specific solutions to turn Information On Demand vision into reality for organizations of any size.
Q: This sounds like Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. Those have been around since the early 90s. What's different?
A: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing technologies enable business analysts to analyze and report on data that has been moved from transactional databases into a common repository or warehouse. While Information On Demand includes BI and Data Warehousing, the initiative espouses a much more comprehensive vision where trusted information is available in context to any user, any application and at any time; not just in reports available to a select group of business analysts. In addition to enabling organizations to leverage information better, Information On Demand includes the ability to establish accurate, trusted information for a single version of the truth, managed over time, built on an efficient and solid foundation for managing data and content over its lifecycle.
Q: What is the Information Agenda?
An Information Agenda is an approach to turning an Information On Demand vision of unlocking the business value of information into reality. An information agenda helps an organization determine how to get started on its Information On Demand journey. IBM will help organizations to create and implement their information agendas, addressing the following four areas:
- Strategy - Creating a vision to guide decisions & help the organization determine how to best support business goals
- Information Infrastructure - Identifying the technology components & capabilities to establish a common information framework
- Roadmap - Establishing a plan for executing discrete projects to realize short and long-term returns on investment
- Information Governance - Implementing policies & practices for managing, using, improving & protecting organizational information
Q: How does Cognos connect with Information On Demand?
A: Cognos extends IBM's Information On Demand value proposition, providing the industry's leading and most complete solutions for unlocking the business value of information, which will extend IBM's ability to capitalize on emerging business growth opportunities, while IBM's hardware, software and services capabilities and extensive global reach will accelerate delivery of Cognos solutions, enabling our customers to:
- maximize the value of their information
- optimize their business processes
- deliver trusted information in real-time
- achieve higher performance across the enterprise
Q: How is Information On Demand related to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)?
A: Information On Demand has very close ties to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where SOA provides the infrastructure to enable business flexibility and Information On Demand provides the information architecture for a Smart SOA approach. The Information On Demand portfolio --from data and content servers to the IBM Information Server, master data management and Cognos-- leverages IBM's SOA strategy.
Information as a Service is the enabler that virtualizes data and content from the base applications so that information can be shared across an enterprise, enabling better business flexibility. Cognos fully leverages SOA for its platform architecture to achieve industry leadership in business intelligence & performance management. By adopting SOA as the platform foundation, Cognos enables their customers to have efficient solutions that fit within fast-changing environments, the reliability needed to function effectively in the face of diverse and changing business requirements, and the agility to respond quickly to rapidly changing business needs.
Q. What’s new with the Information On Demand initiative?
