Following on from my blog yesterday about unstructured data, I have been trying to drill slightly deeper into related subject areas. You might, I hazard a guess, be tempted to think that I would immediately start looking into traditional content management solutions and trying to uncover whether IBM, Oracle, Accenture or Microsoft (or insert techno-behemoth of your own choice) have actually brought anything truly inspirational to market over the last 18 months.

Instead, I’m going to go down the web 2.0 route and ask whether social networking tools could possibly help bring structure and form to previously unmanaged data environments. The argument here is that if you can map social networks (in a professional sense) across the corporate network, then perhaps you can make untapped expertise among your staff base more visible. Next step here – you guessed it - reuse of knowledge assets.

But is this running before we can walk?

Only yesterday I was talking about “traditional” unstructured data i.e. voicemails, scrappy documents, video or other ragged data. This argument is a direct jump to a corporate communications system that would offer a big leap in workplace productivity. The reason I’ve written this blog is that I did find a company that claims to offer this solution. Trampoline Systems says its tools incorporate the social behaviour surrounding electronic information and that this is key to productivity gains.

I suppose this is like an internal corporate version of About.com as it has ‘discovery’, ‘knowledge pool’ and ‘live profile’ functions. I would also guess that it requires a certain amount of ‘buy-in’ from all employees. But what if it’s a great tool, but misused? What if it takes up too much time for particular key employees? What if people ask too many silly questions that they should know already if they had read the corporate handbook? I’m sure you can probably set controls – but it’s a relatively unproven type of solution at this stage isn’t it? Interesting stuff though.

If you care to Google “unstructured content” you’ll find remarkably few companies trying to sell you a solution to the problem of data that doesn’t integrate comfortably with the rest of the corporate technology stack. Now that might be because you should really type in “data mining” or “tagging” or “content management” etc. But it could also be due to the fact that we still have a major issue here.

According to a new IDC report I’ve just been sent a summary of, two-thirds of senior IT decision makers in Western Europe claim to have unstructured data adequately managed, or are making significant inroads to do so (43 per cent). Yet this is countered by the fact that when it comes to making decisions, 60 per cent of enterprises polled admit to either having too much information, or the information they need to make decisions is buried in irrelevant data.

I won’t bore you with a whole raft of the survey’s other figures, but personally I’m surprised to read that 63 per cent of European enterprises consider email as the primary source for managing unstructured content. Managing it you say? I would have said that it’s the primary source for creating it! Of course, email is the source of information to which people are most likely to turn when making decisions. So maybe the problem is inherently endemic.

Flexible web 2.0 type tools are sometimes heralded as an unstructured data panacea to bring more data management into dynamic environments. But I’d say it’s still early days for web 2.0 and I’d be pretty nervous about committing to a big investment in this area if I was a corporate CTO.

As is so often the way with these things, two pieces of work that I’m looking at for two different sources collide on the same day. In the middle of writing up the technology section for the International Gas Union’s yearbook (like you do) I was flipping through an average inbox’s worth of press releases and see that the CBI Climate Change Task Force recognises that technology has a key part to play in tackling climate change. You’d be worried if they didn’t right?

According to the CBI, “Technology has a vital part to play in opening up sustainable solutions. The UK has a unique opportunity to prosper in key markets of the future by taking a lead in the development of low carbon technologies and services in power, buildings, transport and industry.”

According to task force member Sun Microsystems, “Climate change is both a threat and a real opportunity for organisations, no matter what their size, to contribute an active role in the environment and UK plc has a massive role to play in this change. UK businesses need to work together to factor energy consumption into every procurement decision, from a stationary order to a PC overhaul. The technology sector has a major role to play in sustainability. No matter what the solutions are to the issue of climate change, technology will be vital in their development and management. The environmental credentials of technology products are having a major impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions.”

According to Gartner, “IT accounts for two per cent of global carbon emissions and that does not even take into account the increasing cost of air conditioning as more powerful processors are squeezed into ever-smaller spaces. The technology sector has a commitment to the research and implementation of achievable and sustainable goals.”

According to me, having known very little about the energy sector until a couple of weeks ago, I’d like to draw up a three tier structure in terms of where I see technology in this industry.

We can draw a distinction between those implementations of IT in the energy industry that have improved business processes and could equally have been deployed in a non-energy sector environment – this is what we (for the sake of argument) will call a tier one development and it could manifest itself as something as fundamental as a business process management system.

Tier two would be more bespoke developments such as Computer Aided Design (CAD) mapping systems specifically developed to act as deployments within the gas industry.

Finally, tier three technology developments are those that come about as refinements in the physics or chemistry of how we handle gas, but that are driven by our increased prowess in research and development as a result of having more computing power to hand.

Which ever way you slice it then, we know that green tech is here to stay and will become more pervasive as the years go on.

Boy have I heard this one before - it’s a common complaint among the IT fraternity - not enough voice is given to tech management during boardroom meetings. CTOs are notoriously badly represented at most AGMs (annual general meetings) and a similarly poor showing is seen during M&A (mergers and acquisition) activity. Ask a techie what the most likely result of this is in practice – and hopefully the answer you’ll get will be, “shoddy integration.”

In a recent piece of data fired at me yesterday I see that Bloor Research has found that 79 per cent of M&A activity ignores IT integration (that seems ridiculously high – but let’s go on for now) and despite the fact that 50 per cent of the CIOs (or CTOs) said they knew about the planned M&A “months before” it happened, 37.5 per cent said that a detailed plan for system integration wasn't put in place until 'months after.'

They also found that more than one third do not expect integration to be complete within two years of the M&A deal being completed – and that 54 per cent cited poor overall data quality and documentation as a significant issue.

Bloor’s research was undertaken via a survey of the National Computing Centre (NCC) membership. The full report, is titled "Mergers and Acquisitions and their IT Impact," includes anonymous quotes from senior level IT respondents and is available on Informatica’s (the company who commissioned the survey) web site.

Personally, if I was one of the “37.5 per cent said that a detailed plan for system integration wasn't put in place”… wouldn’t you think, well, I need to speak up a bit! Maybe that’s the reason I’m not getting much voice in the boardroom, y’know? I know IT managers are all to often sidelined at a management level, but I question whether these figures are skewed to be overly reactionary to make headlines. Is it really that bad out there guys?

Having been personally involved with developer user groups for some years now I have a vested interest in the way they operate and whether the members find the services offered a) value for money b) useful in their day to day work or c) just a thinly veiled version of their platform or application vendor of choice’s corporate message set.

Today’s user community of interest is the UK’s Oracle User Group, as this weekend I was given some embargoed info that the rest of the media world will be privy to on the Monday you may read this. Initially sceptical of this user group survey I dismissed it as most likely to contain tired out old info of the ‘hey we had a great set of user group meetings this year’ variety – a closer look revealed some more constructive info than you might expect.

From 600 conference delegates questioned at their annual shindig in Birmingham, the survey showed low levels of satisfaction for Oracle Support with 1 in 5 Oracle Support users being ‘unhappy’ with an element of Oracle Support.

Dissatisfaction with global support desks increased by more than double from 7 to 17%. However Oracle Web Conference/Direct Connect and Remote Diagnostic Tools were rated highly by those who use them and indicate that greater take up by users would significantly improve the support experience. Looking further, 14% of people using an Oracle Account Team are ‘unhappy’ with it, this is a 4% increase from 2006.

Satisfaction in the Oracle licensing scheme has fallen since 2005, just 15% of respondents said they were happy or very happy, a 5% decrease since 2006 and users saying they were unhappy or very unhappy increased to 32%.

OK OK – I’ve picked on all the negative stuff, 600 delegates don’t travel all the way to Birmingham just to say they are brassed off. Believe me, three years at University in the West Midlands is enough to be able to tell you that with some certainty. So what did they like?

Oracle University did especially well in the survey with 44% of respondents saying they were ‘very happy’ with Oracle University, a 16% increase on 2006. More than half (54%) of Oracle Consulting customers are ‘happy’ with their overall experience. Over three-quarters (76%) of Oracle Consulting customers in 2007 would recommend their services to other organisations. Overall satisfaction with the Oracle Corporation has increased by 7% in 2007. Finally, 81% of Oracle Server users are ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’ with the product

Of special note was satisfaction in PeopleSoft and JD Edwards increasing following the results of the 2006 survey. You might even be tempted to think that this user group actually listens to its membership base then. I’m sure they do, no user community achieves longevity if it fails to respond to its users. I’ve seen these guys operate as I attended their annual get together a couple of years ago – I think one of the best things about them is that once you start drilling into the technology you can go to the main Oracle web site and download technical podcasts to up your background knowledge before you attend any meets. Well, you’ve got to have something to do between Euston and Birmingham New Street stations haven’t you!?