I must say that the recent prediction that web and collaboration tools will lead to corporate IT departments becoming increasingly marginalised made me smirk.

Analyst firm, Gartner published its business intelligence (BI) and performance management research agenda last Friday and said that, as individual users and business units use these tools to build their own analytic applications, IT’s role in delivering such functionality will diminish.

By 2010, it said interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service oriented architectures (SOAs) would allow business users to build and consume their own BI reports.

I smiled as I recollected a BI vendor espousing its vision of ‘a dashboard on very employee’s desk’ or ‘putting the tools in the hands of the business users,’ and that was almost four years ago. Now it seems the technology is catching up to make this a reality.

“Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15% to 20% of business users,” said Kurt Schlegel, research director at Gartner. “For the BI sector to thrive, it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use.”

But IT can’t have it both ways: on one hand, IT bemoans the endless list of reports it is asked to compile from ageing database silos and change requests it has to handle. On the other, it fears the loss of control that will inevitably come with putting more web-based and collaboration tools in the hands of business users.

I would’ve thought Gartner’s BI predictions would be welcomed by IT. It’s not like they’ve nothing to do in the meantime. Facilitating the maintenance of the infrastructure (the ‘keeping the lights on’ bit), not to mention the governance, security and availability of these new systems, will mean IT remains just as important to the core running of the business as it’s always been.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the term “business continuity” has been everywhere recently. And no, I’m not falling into the trap of some carefully woven pre-event marketing PR bunny spin around some dull, business continuity conference.

Only last week, I wrote a story on research from IDC and BT that found more than one in five (21 per cent) of UK big business lacks detailed business continuity plans in the event of IT downtime. More surprisingly perhaps, it found 71 per cent of businesses have no emergency IT and communications systems recovery plan.

Apart from it being common sense to plan for emergencies in our increasingly stormy and windswept, terror ridden and technologically dependent island existence, planning for disasters should also be part and parcel of good governance and security business IT strategies too. Having things like an up-to-date contact list so that you can track down employees potentially trapped in an emergency situation is a no-brainer. But that list is no good to you stored on a database when the servers or networks have gone down.

To this effect, it’s rare for a new British Standard to attract as much interest as the latest business continuity standard and certification, BS 25999, has attracted. The British Standards Institute (BSI) said it is the fastest ever selling British Standard, as well as receiving more downloads during the public consultation phase than ever before.

Echoing the findings of the IDC/BT research, a poll carried out last by Business Continuity Expo 2008 (oh dear) showed that 60 per cent of companies are now considering certification to BS 25999 – bringing business continuity planning and management right to the top of the corporate agenda for the first ever time.

As Britain prepares to batten down the hatches again this week, I can think of no better time to reflect that UK businesses are ignoring business continuity at their peril.

Densa, the Hitachi Electronics subsidiary quietly launched its radio frequency identification (RFID) based integrated room management security system over the weekend.

I say “quietly” because the launch was in Japan only. But the fact that it represents a logical progression in the development of this wireless technology may be overlooked for the inherent privacy issues that widespread adoption of such systems by corporates is bound to raise.

We are more familiar with examples set by Wal-Mart, Tesco, Marks and Spencer and Germany’s METRO Group of enterprise RFID use behind-the-scenes, in the supply chain. But long since radio frequency tracking has existed in warehouses, they has been tension between workers, their unions and employees about unfair tracking during downtime, when their scanning devices can pinpoint their whereabouts anywhere with an RF coverage area. The European Union has been wrestling with knotty regulatory issues for some years as a result.

It strikes me that the Densa launch will bring this capability to the white collar worker’s doorstep…literally. Access control systems have also been around for some time in offices. And some companies, like BT, are some way to developing integrated single sign-on (SSO) access and control systems to more and more of their facilities. But we’ve all left the dongle on the desk when we nip from our desk on a bathroom break and had to loiter in corridors, waiting for someone else to let us in. (Although, I pity the poor employee stuck between both office and bathroom doors before they even get to go!)

So, the inherent benefits in an active wireless system that can tell it’s you from up to 20 metres away and grant or deny you access based on your role or privileges seem clear. And Densa is aiming it at medical and food-related industries first. But the potential for wider integration with other monitoring technologies, like CCTV on entering a room, as well as network, PC and server-based logging must also be watched closely, so it does not become open to abuse.

With government scrutiny over competition and land management dominating the grocery supermarket industry headlines, it was with some considerable surprise I recently reported that Morrisons had signed up to modernise its IT infrastructure based on Oracle’s entire suite of retail, back-office and database products.

As part of the fourth largest UK supermarket’s publicly declared intention to spend £110 million on modernising its operations, the fact that Morrisons is spending money on IT was not the surprising fact. Many in the retail industry have known for some time that ‘the Morrisons way’ has historically been paper-based and manual, with computerisation being almost forced on it where unavoidable.

I remember writing stories at the time Morrisons acquired its slightly larger rival, Safeway in 2003 that raised doubts over whether it could handle the merger. Safeway had quite advanced IT systems, including recent investments at the time in PeopleSoft back-office software and automated warehouse systems, which sources told me were being sidelined or ripped out in favour of ‘the Morrisons way’. Otherwise, “it was the highway,” I was told at the time.

All went very quiet on the IT front for some time at Morrisons which, to be fair, seems to have finally completed the full merger with Safeway – changing over stores and assessing the suitability of integrating its systems across its 375 store estate. It most recently posted positive post-Christmas trading figures, saying it attracted over 4 million extra customer visits during that six-week period and that its three-year Optimisation Plan was on schedule. But compared to the multichannel capabilities of the top three – Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda – Morrisons always seems to be a poor relation.

No, the most surprising thing about the deal announced last Friday is the faith it demonstrates it is placing in the one vendor, with its ‘prototype Oracle footprint’. It fits with the ‘Morrisons way’ of thinking and confirms Oracle’s acquisition strategy to build a complete IT infrastructure portfolio is paying dividends in vertical markets it hasn’t traditionally played well in. But only time will tell whether this massive strategic gamble will pay off for Morrisons. 

As the world and his wife obsess about the state of the mobile communications industry at its biggest gathering at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, I get to sit at home and muse over why we haven’t seen the revolution of mobile services we were all told to expect a couple of years ago.

Third generation (3G) mobile networks were meant to usher in a whole new raft of services, like location-based classified search, music downloads and even TV on the move. But after the expensive spectrum auction, few operators have seen their investment turned into a tangible increase in their average revenue per user, or ‘ARPU’ as they like to say in industry parlance.

I was writing a story last week that made me think about why this is. Consumer mobile research carried out by AppTrigger found that most users were still stuck in 2003 in terms of what services they regularly used on their handsets. Most, like me, make calls and send texts – which, by the way, don’t seem to be any less popular – but that’s as far as it goes.

Last year I was loaned a 3G phone (whose provider and manufacturer shall remain unnamed) and found that, although data transfer speeds were okay, holding onto a 3G signal on a train for instance was near impossible. My husband went out and bought a similar phone to my own so we could try video calling. But there have been precisely two occasions both he and I have been in 3G range to complete the video call. At the same time, the analysts are telling us mobile payments are set to be the next big thing, racking up $22 billion (£11.3 billion) in the next five years.

The problem is the user interfaces – Apple’s iPhone says more than I ever could here – and the fact that mobile operators are only now putting their marketing spend behind partnerships that have the brand pull to raise awareness of these services. The addition of easy-to-access Google Search and other branded music, movie, TV download or search products is the only way to popularise what should already be a far more useful device than the mobile phone actually is.