Palm oil is a multi-billion dollar industry, yet to date no attempt has been made for complex knowledge modeling within the Palm Oil industry. As oil palm plantation industries contain numerous changing conditions and since relevant decision making parameters are dynamic as well, an intelligent Decision Support System (DSS) that is context sensitive, environment specific and localized for the user is needed. Our proposed solution empowers the end-users through semantic and ontology development methods, where the involvement of domain experts and end-users drive the application development.

In this initial article, I provide an overview of my ‘version’ of SSOA. I summarize a couple of perspectives and then highlight the technical underpinnings.  I close by summarizing and supplying a projected roadmap for this column.  As a point of order, my background is with the U.S. Navy; therefore, my perspective tends toward military/government settings. However, as I will indicate in a subsequent article, at their core all organizations strive to be the best at the same process: decision making.

In many ways, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is as misunderstood as Semantics. Although EA has been practiced across a much wider community of IT professionals for a longer period of time, it still suffers from an identity crisis. Is EA the mandatory precursor for model driven development, or is it part of a bigger picture and if so, what is that picture?

I had an interesting conversation this week with a colleague regarding the relative lack of success with many current Knowledge Management Platforms / Systems. One of the first and most obvious problems is that there isn’t clear a set of expectations as to what constitutes Knowledge Management in contrast with Content Management and Collaboration. Add to this a blending of case and/or workflow management capabilities into the picture and it becomes perhaps even more confusing to determine just what type of a solution one needs or may be using. The end users find this confusing as well, which is why many of these systems are underutilized and the alleged ROI associated with them is never actually realized.

I recently completed a high-profile deliverable for a major client. While I feel satisfaction for meeting the explicit goals of the project, I’m even happier that I’ve finally met goals that reflect some of my core motivations for working with information technology. To illustrate what I’ve done – and why – I’m going to use a specific event that happened over three years ago.

Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.