I received today one of those email “flyers” advertising “semantics and the enterprise”. The link took me to a site for the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference. I was intrigued about this flyer since the notion of applying or exploiting semantic web technology inside the enterprise remains elusive. Even at Gartner I was unable to excite our “semantic web” analysts with the notion of “getting more applicable to business” by thinking of how firms actually work! For too long “semantic web” has focused on how data moves across the internet, which, for the most part, has little to do with the transactional side of the economy and is more focused on either B2C or how information is shared between people. The level of investment and thinking applied to “inside enterprises” or “B2B” compared to B2C or the social side of the web is much, much lower.
I talked about the idea of a “semantic enterprise” about 6 years ago when preparing for a presentation at one of our Spring Symposiums, where I had the good pleasure of speaking with Simon Hayward. The “Connected Enterprise” (the name of the pitch; we would not describe it as the hyper-connected enterprise!) represents one of those presentations that sought to connect how firms operate, with how people behave, and many ideas linked in that pitch (individually not really new, even then) continue to come back presented as “new ideas” with a different name. I remain astonished at the lack of interest in applying semantic web to the enterprise. I think it is because most technologies believe that there is no real issue! But given the level of interest in MDM, itself not really a new idea (but more a very old problem), shows that enterprises do NOT operate with a semantic model. Worse, the connection between what a business can do with IT WITH a semantic model remains elusive and vague. That is the problem. Ever tried to talk with the CEO or VP of Sales about their semantic model for customer? That’s a sure way to leave the office quickly.
MDM is, according to one view, a semantic oriented discipline. I would tend to agree. MDM focuses on sustaining “single view” of critical enterprise information, and this looks and smells like an argument for mapping semantics across different systems and data stores. I wrote about TopQuadrant (one of the vendors sponsoring the event noted above) in Cool Vendors in Master Data Management, 2008, and this technology is very much focused on applying semantic web technology within the enterprise. This is not a plug for the vendor, but used as an example to make the point. I think the link between semantics and semantic web, and MDM, will increase. I think that’s a good thing for business.