TORONTO, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ - Forrester Research Inc. has highlighted Flybits, a Toronto-based startup company, as the number one context-aware tool for its emerging cloud and context-aware middleware solution.

Anthony Mullen’s report, “Emerging Touchpoints Require a Marketing Mind Shift,” encourages marketing professionals to increase corporate investments in innovative practices and procedures in areas such as customer experience, analytics, IT and product design — all of which the Flybits framework addresses. Read more

Borris Evelson of the Forrester Research blog recently shared Forrester’s prediction for business intelligence advances in 2013 and beyond. Evelson writes, “BI-specific DBMSes will gain popularity. Alternative database management system (DBMS) engines architected specifically for agile BI will emerge as one of the key fundamental agile BI technologies that BI pros should closely evaluate and consider. These specialized, BI-specific DBMS databases — those that are designed specifically for BI reporting and analysis — currently have lower adoption rates when compared with their bigger, older, more versatile, jack-of-all-trades RDBMS cousins. But don’t expect these low adoption rates to continue; BI-specific DBMSes started to become mainstream in 2012 and the trend will continue in 2013. Forrester expects that more than 20% of all BI applications will be based on this technology within the next two years.” Read more

Does your organization find that it can develop a new product faster than your IT group can create a new application to manage it?  Are your existing systems too inflexible?

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— ANDREW CRAPO, AMY ARAGONES

Executive Summary

There are a variety of tools and approaches available to model the enterprise and its processes. Almost all of these lack a clear, standards-based semantics and the ability to integrate different types of enterprise models. Semantic technology addresses some but not all enterprise modeling needs. Hence enterprise modeling can derive significant benefit from embracing semantics, and semantic technology might be made significantly more robust and valuable by applying the community’s skills to enterprise modeling problems at-hand.

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The problem of business-IT alignment is of widespread economic concern, and is largely caused by a semantic disconnect between business people and technologists. The business people speak English, and the techies have to translate that English into something a computer can understand — often a low-level, step-by-step way to complete a task. The margin for error is great. The situation is a bit like the childhood game called Telephone — by the time the message gets to the last person, it has changed dramatically from the original. The problem is made worse by the fact that the business requirements often change during a project.

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