Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

James Tarbell has an interesting point on Business Architecture that folks should chime in on...

Over a year ago, James Governor of Redmonk and I had a conversation regarding large enterprises and their ability to become more transparent. I figured I would share a couple of thoughts that we have been noodling at work in this regard...



The very first myth that I would like to dispell is that large analyst firms have an advantage over small analyst firms when it comes to sharing of information. Alex Fletcher of Entiva believes that small analyst firms won't be afforded the same opportunity to talk with us when in all reality the exact opposite is true. In fact, we are currently working with a one-person analyst firm named Elemental Links who is currently doing a case study on some of our enterprise architecture practices. In the past we have also done case studies with a very large two-person analyst firm on our SOA implementations named ZapThink.

I bet you didn't know that in terms of working with an analyst firm to have our own perspectives told, we actually have a strong preference for working with the small guys but not for the reasons you may think. Consider the fact that large enterprisey places have folks in departments named media relations. Have you ever considered that they may be measured on how much media they generate? Now, consider one large analyst firm who almost never mentions the names of their clients and will take the tact of referring to us as a Fortune 200 Financial Services Company headquartered in New England. Do you think folks in media relations if they are measured would want to participate in abstraction?

Small analyst firms don't have silly anonymous policies and can whenever faced with an enterprise who only says things on the record actually has an advantage. Likewise, consider another large analyst firm that likes to cover a subject by including quotes from multiple companies in their research reports. Now consider the perspective of folks in media relations and ask yourself would they rather spend time being lumped together with other folks or would they prefer some exclusivity?

While I am personally a big fan of open source analysis and this wonderful idea started by the folks at RedMonk, I do acknowledge that conversations cannot be measured but the amount of printed research reports in which my employer's name is mentioned can. I also understand that while blogging is expedient, it doesn't carry the same weight as a research report. Sorry, analysts if you want to work with large enterprises, you should blog but also suck it up and also write more formal research reports on a frequent basis.

The third perspective I would like to share is that small analyst firms are making a crucial mistake in terms of not allowing anyone to steer what they talk about. I agree wholeheartedly that avoiding allowing vendors to determine your publishing schedule is a good thing that I can't honestly say the same thing applies to us large enterprises who have nothing to sell. We tend to have a preference of wanting to work with folks who express a preference in wanting to work with us. If I suggest certain research topics and you not only acknowledge receipt of them but actually make a conscious effort to do some of them then that will cause us to be more open. It is all about value and less about idealism.



If you ever happen to run across Dan Blum of the Burton Group, he will tell you personally that we share our thoughts not only in terms of formal calls but also periodically send him our strategies, results of proofs of concepts we have conducted and so on. Likewise, their analysts have asked not only myself but many of my peers to review their research to see if it resontates with us. I have never been asked this of any of the smaller firms.

Alex, I have had the opportunity read your report on LogicBlaze ESB and will be encouraging others to do the same. If you trolled old mailing lists for this project, you may run across several discussions with a Fortune 100 Enterprise whose primary business model isn't technology and their efforts to help certify ServiceMix to run on 384 CPUs appliances so as to ensure the most scalable ESB on the planet.

You are probably aware that neither Gartner nor Forrester even mentioned ServiceMix in their latest Quadrants or Waves, so enterprises that want to understand open source have no choice but to consider alternatives. If you were to decide to do coverage on Liferay Enterprise Portal, you would also see various familiar names of other Fortune enterprises who are contributing.

It would be interesting to see reports on other if you want to do a case study on anything my employer does, all you have to do is ask. This offer is open to any analyst in the blogosphere...

Please support Bloggers Rights!

Sam Parnell is seeking a J2EE and Ruby on Rails Developer at Core Continuum. If you know J2EE the salary is $150K a year. If you only know Ruby on Rails then the salary is $25K a year,all the donuts you can eat and the opportunity to read enterprise architecture books in order to remain employable...

I have been a good blogger this year and have not missed a single day sharing my thoughts. Hopefully I will be showered with gifts...



Here are some gift ideas in case you haven't figured out what I would like:

• Open Source Analysis: Imagine if the blogosphere could collectively convince Gartner and Forrester of the merits of listing non-commercial open source projects in their respective Magic Quadrants and Waves right next to commercial proprietary closed-source vendor offerings. If the comparison focused more on products than vendors then open source has a fighting chance of actually being shown in a fair light. Enterprises need solutions to the business problems regardless of whether it is from a commercial vendor or not. Please help us be successful by not censoring and filtering out alternatives. I hope that Charlene Li and Tom Austin will not only assist the blogosphere in this goal, they will do so publicly from their own blogs


• Cardspace: Microsoft will come to realize that folks in the Java community are second-class citizens in terms of their intellectual capability and realize that we are not capable of incorporating CardSpace into our applications and need their assistance. Kim Cameron and team will personally champion getting other Microsoft employees to contribute to Liferay Enterprise Portal as the official Microsoft-endorsed Java reference implementation


• Ruby on Rails: While I have done a great job of torquing this community, hopefully one or two members will understand the notion of tough love and instead of being pissed will actually devote some brainpower into solving for many of the issues I raised. Within the marketplace, we all know that perception is reality. Change perceptions and you will then change realities...


• Identity Management: Mark Dixon and Pat Patterson will further increase the integrity of their blog entries by not just talking about the problem space of identity management and how they can help but also talk about what identity management doesn't include. For example, if you are a new employee to an enterprise and need access to a myriad of enterprise applications can the current solutions provision a credential into each and every system you need access to? The answer is yes. Can these same tools effectively provision a credential so that you are up and running? The answer changes because to be effective at provisioning the conversation has to go way beyond identity and workflow and into entitlements and role engineering. Hopefully they can devote several blog entries in 2007 to these two critical topic areas


• Infoworld: Hopefully, I can convince Jon Udell to tell the story of large enterprises whose primary business model isn't technology but yet how they also contribute to open source. I am sure that he is familiar with Aviva Canada and how they contributed their in-house ESB to the JBoss organization or how Duke Energy contributed a wonderful .NET framework or how folks over at Merrill Lynch are contributing to a new Message Queue and the list goes on. Jon is probably the only one with enough integrity to talk about this space as the industry analysts for the most part are owned by software vendors.


• Smalltalk: I think it has the potential to make a comeback which is highly dependent upon members of this community pulling out all stops to win over the hearts and minds of large software vendors and even large enterprise customers. Will they feel it is worth the effort or simply not bother as more folks embrace Java?


• SOA: Enterprises will stop doing SOA as they will finally realize that all the vendor hype is leading them to a worse place. They will finally acknowledge that they need to master enterprise architecture before attempting SOA. They will also stop buying ESB products that don't support industry standards such as BPEL, XACML and SAML regardless of how analysts declare them to be in the leaders spot.


• Industry Analysts: Hopefully, I can see the likes of Redmonk, ZapThink, Nemertes, Elemental Links, The 451 Group and CBDI Forum all merge! Hopefully they understand that large enterprises already have hundreds of vendors with many of us having well into the thousands and that one problem space us enterprisey folk struggle with is in the reduction of the amount of vendors we do business with. Going to the table and asking for one analyst firm that provides a unique value proposition is possible, but asking for seven simply will not happen. Even if you don't merge due to conflicting models or even philosophies, you should at least figure out a way collectively for a large enterprise from a procurement standpoint to look like one. If you don't spend time on this, I will understand. After all, it is sometimes comfortable and familiar to be owned by software vendors than to do real work...

Here is an interesting blog entry on how folks in other countries such as India provide outsourcing services to create spam...

Figured I would share several IT executive anti-patterns when it comes to truly being agile...



Listed below are some key considerations:

• Mistaking management for leadership: These two words are not interchangable! Many IT executives promote folks up through the ranks either based on demonstrated competencies and/or the ability to influence neither of which is representative of being a leader. When was the last time you sent your architects to leadership courses? Agility requires leadership and facilitation (distinct from representation) and not everyone is born with those skills


• Process as a substitute for competence: In many shops, process is used to turn valuable IT staff into repeat-after-me uber-consistent Full-time equivalents which demonstrates that they don't get the real value of process. Processes should harness collective competence and figure out how to leverage breadth and diversity. Consider your enterprise architecture team and the various challenges they face. You may need someone who understands business architecture, and someone else who understand your enterprise strengths, weaknesses, hisotry, IT portfolio, culture and politics well enough to make business architecture successful. Process should uncover the unique capabilities of individuals and eschew attempting to make everyone the same


• Education is key: Understand that it takes a long time for most people to deal with paradigm shifts as they may not be lucky enough to have IT folks such as my peers where shift happens. To be successful in paradigm shifting you need to do more than just executive communications but instead acknowledge that you need to educate others. Education doesn't happen by reading memos as this is best known as knowledge transfer. Education only happens via face-to-face conversations. Do your IT executives only talk to their direct reports? If so, you are guaranteed to fail.


• Allow for failure: In many IT shops there is more of a desire to not fail than to succeed. In order to accomplish meaningful transformation, IT shops need to experiment and try things they haven't done before. Some attempt to mitigate failure by hiring consultants which only works at some level and is almost guaranteed to result in mediocrity as they will push best-practices which assume there is only one single way of doing something...


• Learn how to ask for help: Nowadays many executives are afraid to ask for help which at some level requires them the ability to admit to not knowing everything. When was the last time you heard your boss say: I don't know? Asking for help is not about the hierarchy but more about finding those with perspectives that can be beneficial regardless of whether they work in your shop or even your compeititors. For example, if you are struggling with a component of enterprise architecture, SOA, etc consider reaching out to folks in Fortune 100 enterprises who have had demonstrated success in this area. I am sure they would be willing to help

If you have read my blog for any extended period of time, you will know that I am beyond frustrated with large analyst firms and their lack of integrity in not showing all the software products that are worthy of enterprise consideration and instead simply focusing on proprietary closed source vendors who pay them money. Enterprise architects really need to ask themselves if they appreciate industry analysts practicing censorship and not telling you about opportunities to reduce total cost of ownership...



In the past I have encouraged others to check out industry analyst bloggers such as James Governor of Redmonk, Raven Zachary and others in hopes that if the conversation moved away from large analyst firms to those who are smaller that some additional insight may emerge. The folks over at ARmadgeddon may have caused me to rethink my reasoning.

The real problem that enterprises face is getting stories told that folks otherwise wouldn't here. Sometimes, we benefit from gaining insight from meaningful discussions with analysts, at other times the benefit we could gain feels a lot more like the ability to tell an analyst to provide coverage on a given topic of importance to us and to share it with others. I still have yet to find any analyst firm that wanted to help me out with this dimension.

Imagine being a large customer to the likes of Oracle, IBM, BEA, Microsoft, EMC, etc and really wanting to see a feature show up in their next release but having to overcome an otherwise painful conversation. How many times have enterprise architects dragged their vendors into locked rooms and made them listen to their ideas only to hear a civil response indicating how wonderful the idea is but to also hear we haven't heard your requirements articulated by other customers?

Wouldn't it be interesting if a large enterprise could simply articulate their problem to an industry analyst firm who would also find other customers with the same problem and then collectively write up the research for all to see? Enterprises in this scenario would actually become more sharing in terms of their media relations policies since it is not about endorsing a vendor or giving away anything that even remotely feels like competitive advantage.

If you consider the frustrations that us enterprise architects encounter on a daily basis in this regard and the evil solutions we are forced to consider, the cost-benefit analysis of using more industry analysts would actually work. For example, if large vendor X decides to pull the phrase that acknowledges the problem but states that they haven't heard it elsewhere, the enterprise has three choices:

• Continue to have nice cordial conversations with vendors that really go no where and hope the relationship is smoothed over during an expensive lunch and some trinkets to take home to the kids


• Not even getting an expensive lunch since many vendors nowadays are operating off lower capital and simply allowing the problem to fester


• Solving the problem yourself spending way more in terms of developer time while also increasing TCO for something that otherwise should be built into the vendors stack

Right now, I tend to only interact with large analyst firms in my day job. I know I can make a sound business case for purchasing services from small analyst firms if and only if I could get them to not just share insights but to actually write research papers on topics I suggest. The funny thing is that the large guys seem to be more willing to take some of my ideas and run with them.

The folks over at Redmonk have a policy of not getting paid by vendors to create research reports. While I understand this perspective, I would argue that the logic is somewhat flawed in that it also unfairly excludes folks such as myself who are not vendors to have our ability to influence what gets written by simply paying for it.

Don't get it twisted as I am not attacking Redmonk nor suggesting any form of integrity flaw. They happen to know that I am big fans of them. Likewise, the notion of transparency is equally important to me and them and I shall respect whatever decision they choose for their business model. Hopefully, they will not leave open an opportunity for others to seize...

There is a story that analysts refuse to tell about large enterprises whose primary business model isn't technology and their wonderful contributions to open source. In the past, I have talked about wonderful enterprises such as Duke Energy and Morgan Stanley. Today, I just learned that Aviva who is the second largest insurer in Canada contributed their in-house written ESB to the JBoss project.

They build their own ESB when they started to encounter integration problems rolling out Oracle Financials. Being that they are also a big user of JBoss application server, contributing simply made good business sense. I have even asked other analyst firms such as Redmonk figuring that they wouldn't ignore the idea like the large analysts firms to provide coverage on this emerging dimension. I failed in this approach as well. I did forget to ask Raven Zachary of 451 Group to dig into this and publish, hopefully I won't fail a second time.

Likewise, I think it would be equally interesting if Matt Asay of the OSBC would also track down their CIO and get him/her to speak at the next conference. I will also be pinging Chad Hersh, Donald Light and Matthew Josefowicz of Celent Research to see if they would be game to cover this trend from an industry vertical perspective...

Lots of folks in large enterprises would love to share their knowledge with others but simply don't know of the best way to go about it. Luckily, I have the answer...



Springer Verlag has launched a brand new book series that targets problems facing large enterprises and invites thought leaders to submit book proposals on topics of interest to CIOs and other IT executives. We are attempting to find a single author to contribute two to three chapters (approx 35-40 pages each chapter) in the next three to six months on any of the below topics:

• Relationship between ITIL and EA


• Application Rationalization


• Managing People


• IT Measurements & Metrics


• Enterprise Architecture Frameworks


• Innovation

The ideal author will have the following characteristics:

• Author has been previously published in the professional world.


• Resident of either the United States, Canada, UK or any South American / Caribbean country


• Familiar with the principles behind the Agile Manifesto


• Currently employed (distinct from simply working for or having experience in) by Fortune 500 enterprise, Federal Government or its international equivalent or employed by a large 1000+ consulting firm (Exceptions made for Gary Short, James Robertson and David Heineimer Hannson or employees of industry analyst firms). Either way, shouldn't be any limitations as to whether you are allowed to say who you work for.


• Frequent speaker at industry conferences or blogger within the blogosphere

If interested, please leave contact information in the comments...

We know there is a differential in the quality of ideas and for anyone who bothers to glance at the subject, it's easy enough to see that there's a differential in the quality of folks who have ideas vs folks who don't...



This phrase is most often uttered by those who champion weaker forms of innovation when in all reality they should be focused on unleashing good ideas by acknowledging the differential. Some will wonder how big the differential is while others will go in the wrong direction by attempting to capture metrics behind it. For example, there isn't a large difference in the bushel price of wheat from different sources but there is a big difference in the price of houses, and this has practical consequences. One consequence is that if you talk about the average price of wheat, you're talking about something meaningful, whereas if you're talking about the average price of houses (three orders of magnitude) or the per capita income in a country like the USA (three or four orders of magnitude), it really doesn't mean anything.

So what's the differential in the value of ideas? This requires establishing a lower bound for marketable ideas and an upper bound and then comparing the two.

So what's the value of the most pedestrian run of the mill ideas which are productive and which people will actually pay to get? Let's consider a process engineer or site engineer as the lower bound. And let's say that a mediocre (but competent and marketable) process engineer working to improve a production line is worth $1 million dollars to a plant (an overestimate). Now, process engineers have numerous small ideas which are put immediately into effect, fully mature, and a halfway decent process engineer might improve a production line a dozen times over a given year in various minor ways. So the minimum value of a good idea can be as low as $100,000.

Now what's the maximum value of a good idea? Well, a revolutionary idea can annihilate entire industries. Not immediately of course but once it matures; the lifecycle of a revolutionary idea is very different from that of a pedestrian idea. So marketing and advertising is a trillion USD a year industry in the USA and if a single idea could wipe out this industry, it would thus have a value of a trillion dollars. This is hardly the only trillion dollar idea. Nuclear bombs have a value around negative a hundred trillion.

So comparing the highest valued ideas (trillion) to the lowest valued (100k), one finds seven orders of magnitude in difference. If one compares the output of the most talented IT professionals with the least talented, there may be as much as two orders of magnitude difference. Two orders of magnitude is considered a fantastic difference. For ideas we have seven.

I wonder if outsourcing surpresses innovation? The task of going to another country to find lower productivity or not even acknowledging productivity as the TCO is cheaper wastes good ideas. Maybe innovation requires challenging enterprise architecture approaches which are based on habitual cheap junk ideas that are lying around them in the form of inventoryism, over-reliance on industry analysts and management by magazine.

What if enterprises who wanted to become truly innovative figured out first how to appreciate the magnificence of good ideas? Maybe enterprise architecture teams don't have the breadth of thought to step back and appreciate the value of a good idea in its full scope, an idea that may easily affect every single person on our planet in profound ways. This requires imagination...

Thinking out loud is the act of expressing in recoverable and external form new thoughts which you encourage your mind into exploring. Often these lead to new avenues of thought. When you think out loud you detect and explore ideas and concepts which are either unknown or as yet unexplored. This exercise can be the first step in moving from a mental doldrums into new paths of exploration.



Let those around you hear what you're thinking and invite input on your thoughts. The effect of doing thinking out loud and publicly is that it will probably evoke opinions which either support, amplify or contradict and minimize. Some might say "I have a similar but different idea that is Perhaps Better" response, leading to interaction and Dialog.

Of course, there will be those whose attempt to derail thought leadership, but it is vital that you always take the high road. Whether they are successful in exposing vulnerabilities is irrelevant as exposure of your intelligence, knowledge and thoughtful processes are more important. Sometimes critics are envious, but at other times critics are also your best friends.

Sometimes being a thought leader requires great insensitivity to criticism as no one really wants to hear that they are not perfect. They know they're not, but they don't want you to know. The real question is whether these same critics are capable of constructive criticism. In case, they aren't and you are one of them, here are some tips:

• Balance your criticism with praise - everyone has good things and bad things


• If they have an idea, consider offering to help out. You should be life giving and not life draining


• If you don't offer guidance beforehand, maybe it is better to shut your piehole and not criticize after the fact


• Trackback but do so because of some greater objective other than the simple dissection of strengths and weaknesses


• You can't demand or expect that other people's minds operate by your rules.

Over the last several months, I have been savage in blogging on the topic of XACML. Likewise, I have been equally frustrated with industry analysts who are so caught up into the over-hyped problem space of identity management that they can't see the forest for the trees...



Identity Management and the tools in this space are simply not enough. While I understand that it will take most enterprises years to get a handle on the basics, you need to understand that once you are done, you are not done. You need to start asking yourself what are folks such as Mark Dixon, Pat Patterson, Kim Cameron and others not talking about?

The conversation in terms of the Liberty Alliance is tired and no longer adds value. Identity management is sold to large enterprises under the guise of compliance to Sarbanes Oxley yet provides little business enablement. If you are a culture that has embraced the notion of rationalization, and are in the pursuit of eliminating functional redundancies you also haven't thought crisply about your own enterprise.

Finding redundancies is not just a problem-space of taking the notion of Business Architecture but also includes finding redundancies in terms of other aspects within the enterprise. If you dig deeper, you may find that you also need to rationalize the way security is applied throughout the enterprise.

Ask yourself, if you use any of the current web access management products that simply don't work on non-URL architectures such as SOA, will you be duplicating your security model while thinking you are making things better? Do the industry thought leaders on identity have any vested interest in guiding you to eliminating redundancies within your security approach or are they motivated by simply uncovering problem-spaces that result in yet more products being added to the enterprise?

I can say that at least I am not alone in this discussing this problem-space within the blogosphere. You should also check out Shekhar Jha who works for one of the premier consulting firms in this space.

Anyway, the one real 100% unbiased industry analyst Jon Udell at least is starting to talk about the problem ahead of the other so-called analyst firms. Check out this podcast betwen Jon and Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Securent.

Hopefully, since Rajiv is starting the conversation, we could also get folks from BEA, Jericho Systems, Identity Engines, Pega, Documentum, Alfresco, EMC, JBoss, Liferay, ServiceMix, IBM, Oracle and Vordel to not only amplify this type of discussion but to also openly blog on how they align with it...

I wonder if VC firms have noted that large enterprises are starting to pay attention to smaller analyst firms...



If you work for a venture funded startup, you should seriously consider how you spend monies on industry analysts. This week I had an email exchange with one vendor in the entitlements space regarding this topic. He thought that paying analyst firms is a racket which at some level I agree with. Of course, I have two different perspectives on this subject.

The first perspective says that if you aren't happy with large analyst firms because they aren't going deep into research or are attempting to classify you with other vendors that simply don't make sense then don't abandon all analysts as that would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Instead, consider working with smaller firms such as Redmonk, Elemental Links and the 451 Group.

James Governor of Redmonk tells vendors the following:

paying for briefings - screw that! tell the guys to give us a call. briefings are free. and we also give feedback during briefings - anyone that has an interaction with RedMonk should come away with an interesting insight, whether they pay or not.

pay for briefings - that model is so horribly fugly.

I wonder if the likes of Dan Gordon of Valhalla Partners, Ed Sim and David Beisel will start encouraging their portfolio companies to take Redmonk up on their offer? I have been encouraging vendors who cold-call me to also consider smaller analyst firms but many of them aren't paying attention. I wonder if I should pay attention to their value proposition...

It has been a slow weak having only received three calls from recruiters at other enterprises attempting to recruit high quality enterprise architects...



I usually start the conversation by asking how did they learn of me and the most popular answer happens to be LinkedIn where if you search for enterprise architect, I come up first. The main problem with using this approach is that all recruiters happened to have discovered LinkedIn at the same time and therefore aren't learning of candidates other than what is registered.

Reality says that even when recruiters ask folks such as myself if we know of anyone else, we would have already also linked into them and/or have already given out the leads to other recruiters that were faster to the jump than you. Maybe recruiters need to think about the problem space of finding good enterprise architects a little differently.

Lately, I have been asking them if they have attempted to use the blogosphere as a method of finding candidates. Sure, it is a lot more work than simply putting keywords into a search engine. Of course, they can do this and find those who blog on enterprise architect topics and find the likes of Charles Betz, Robert McIlree, Scott Mark, James Tarbell and others but they need to take it even deeper than that.

Imagine if they started to not only follow these folks blogs but also did some research into who left comments in their blogs? One frequent commenter in my blog is James Robertson of Smalltalk fame who tends to take a contrarian position most of the time. The key question is not whether he is currently serving in the role of enterprise architect, but whether he would make a good one and I think the answer is yes in this regard.

Of course, you may also find the likes of David Heinemier Hansson whom likewise loves to throw daggers but otherwise should be avoided as if you read who has linked to me in the past, their thought patterns will become apparent.

Anyway, I would say it is difficult at best to recruit me. In fact, it would be easier to convince Malcolm X to have jungle fever, for George Bush to publicly acknowledge that his Iraqi policies are bad for both Iraq and the United States and even convincing the CIO of a large enterprise whose primary business isn't technology that they should build a mission-critical enterprise application using Ruby on Rails.

I tend to avoid mentioning folks at work by name especially when they are executives but I can say that the absolute number one reason why I cannot be recruited came to me when I walked out of the door and received an email about our upcoming holiday party. Our SVP encouraged folks to bring an unwrapped toy so we can donate to a local charity. While I have been known to use my blog as a bully pulpit to encourage others to think about charity, knowing that our executives are now also carrying the charitable torch brings joy to my heart.

Maybe the action item for recruiters of other enterprises is to teach your executives to not talk in the tone of the your call is important to us, repeat after me, best practices, synergies, etc and to teach them to focus more on being human like the ones I get the privelege of reporting to...

I was thinking that my interaction with various venture capital firms has declined in the past several months and wanted to get back on track to providing them with enterprise perspectives on how they can make their portfolio companies more profitable...



We have all heard statistics from Microsoft such as "for every $2 worth of software purchased legally, $1 worth of software is pirated illegally" which would lead to one of two conclusions. The first camp would think about applying DRM to every piece of software in existence while the other camp would make all software open source. The hybrid answer that I believe is to neither extreme.

Having started my own career on HP3000's and Wangs as a systems adminstrator, later I had the opportunity to get a job programming Windows using the C Windows SDK and it was liberating. Over time, Microsoft at some level indoctrinated me and convinced me that from a usability perspective Linux/Unix simply suck. Of course folks would say that if usability were so important then you should love Mac's but reality is that familiarity is an even more important user requirement than usability.

One of the things that I think keeps me hooked is the fact that I used to bootleg lots of software. The notion of try before buy is the way of the world. Yes, open source provides this as well but it doesn't come with wonderful documentation that allows me to be successful out the gate whereas closed source products tend to be better documented. Over time, I started to take home-oriented thinking and represent it at work, something of which I haven't been able to do with either emerging closed source vendors nor many open source vendors for that matter.

Stopping piracy is a good thing but encouraging it by not protecting your assets is equally good. If you make your closed source software wildly popular in the underground via piracy then folks will demand that publishers such as Wrox, Manning and others write books on such topics solving for the documentation dilemma.

Consider the strategy of SPSS whom is 100% closed source and should stay that way. They give away free copies to MBA graduates as part of their marketing. The notion of catching them young and providing them with a free legitimate version before they grab a pirated one is compelling. If you were to walk the hallways of large enterprises, do you know how many users buy tools at work stimulating sells that otherwise wouldn't have happened?

Maybe piracy is the strategy for displacing competition? For example, imagine if Fortify software started to give away freely copies of its software to the open source community so as to make software more secure, would they displace ounce labs? Remember there is a difference between being free and being open. I wonder how come industry analyst firms when providing sage advice aren't encouraging closed source vendors to do more of this...

I got an email from a fellow EA employed in the banking industry who is seeking my opinion on their strategy to not only use but contribute to open source software. She asked that I suggest five different open source projects worthy of exploration for her organization to consider...



The funny thing is that they want to contribute to open source for financial reasons but still have closed media relations policies which don't allow them to talk about their approach. Of course, my advice was to address the ability to talk about things as the first priority as this is more important than us enterprisey folks actually writing code.

Likewise, I suggested that the problem with open source is not in having enough software developers but in the lack of good comprehensive documentation to make products usable by the masses and therefore contribution at this level should also be considered.

Finally, I hinted at the problem-space that many enterprise architects who go down this path will run into. Simply, while EA's who want to give back to the community are handcuffed by their peers who rely on metrics and the industry analysts who guide them. Sooner or later, someone will stand up and say: How many other enterprises are doing this? Since no industry analyst firm regardless of size has enough integrity to even research this question, you need to figure out this answer for yourself. I did however suggest that she check out the fine work by the folks at Duke Energy, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, JPMChase, Boeing, GM and Bank of America.

Anyway, here are the top five projects that I recommend:

• Liferay Enterprise Portal: I personally know of six different Fortune enterprises within my own vertical that is using this software and about twenty or so in other Fortune verticals. Having a unified role-based user interface helps with compliance, usability and security while increasing potential for scale


• Alfresco: The problem space of managing content is huge yet most enterprises aren't paying much attention to it as the software in this space is expensive and while full of features doesn't have the capabilities that enterprises desire in terms of security, identity and management. This approach could allow you to gain a handle on a problem space you previously couldn't have afforded.


• Intalio: The word BPM is abused even more so than web 2.0, agile or even innovation! BPM has a bigger potential for productivity game than approaches such as Ruby on Rails and allows you to reduce costs by eliminating developers in exchange for higher-order configurability.


• Hercules: Imagine the ability to run a mainframe on commodity Intel machines? While I would not encourage such an approach for production, I would seriously noodle it in a disaster recovery situation and to offload CPU cycles from test complexes. Even James Governor would appreciate such notions...


• ServiceMix: This is an up and coming enterprise service bus that supports standards such as BPEL, XACML and JBI, something of which many of the so-called leaders in this space today don't. You won't find them listed in Gartner's magic quadrant nor Forrester's wave but you will shortly...

If there are other open source projects I should have recommended, please do not hesitate to trackback. In the meantime, I will be starting a campaign to get Jon Udell of Infoworld to get these products into the Infoworld test labs to openly compete against closed-source proprietary vendors...

Confused of Calcutta has picked up on one of my comments that A-List bloggers should link to lesser known bloggers. While I suggested this of others, I have been somewhat guilty of thinking about how I can also participate...



In order to clear any guilt, I would like to increase the number of folks on my blogroll. Of course, I can't add the entire blogosphere so some censorship is in order. If you meet any of the two criteria listed below, please trackback to this entry and I will add you over the long weekend:

• You are an employee of a Fortune 250 enterprise or its international equivalent whose primary business model isn't technology


• You are an industry analyst who is interested in not just covering open source but also actively figuring out how to change your own day job to incorporate it into your own business model


• You agree at bloggers have a fidicuary duty to not only talk about technology but also have an equal if not more important duty to make the world a better place and periodically amplify the need to be charitable


• You are a book author and have been published by reputable publishers such as Springer Verlag, Wiley, Addison Wesley, APress and others. Book authors that have been published by less-reputable publishers such as O'Reilly and Manning, I apologize in advance


• You work for a reputable Indian outsourcing firm who will openly discuss both successes and failures in terms of outsourcing


• You are employed by a large consulting firm (1000+ employees) and ascribe to the principles of the Agile Manifesto


• You are the CTO of an Internet startup whose products embrace any of the following standards/concepts: Federated Identity, XACML, Data De-Identification, SOA, BPM or ECM


• You have in the past positively amplified any of my previous blog postings

Of course, blogging etiquette suggests that blogrolls are reciprocal...

What if all of us enterprisey folks were wrong to think that Ruby on Rails isn't ready for the enterprise and we decided to ignore lack of industry analyst coverage, lack of any quantity of knowledge in large consulting firms or even lack of a single hint that there is a single Fortune 100 enterprise whose primary business model isn't technology and how they have used it to develop a mission-critical enterprise application?



I wonder what would happen if the Ruby on Rails community instead of attacking enterprisey folks instead decided to show up respect like nothing ever seen before? Could an enterprisey insider be the one that helps Ruby climb to dominance? After all, if the Ruby community believes that all we do is follow the lead of each other and none of us are capable of independent thought then it would be logical for them to identify an enterprisey person who is open minded to community-oriented approaches and get him/her to talk about it.

What if the Ruby on Rails community figured out how to politely ask for the contribution of talent to their cause? After all, enterprisey folks have access to capital that dinky not worth talking about small consulting firms don't. Could this be leveraged to the communities advantage?

What would happen if an enterprisey person where to stand up on stage at a major conference that was going to happen in February encouraging other enterprisey folks to consider Ruby on Rails? Do you think analysts would stand up and pay attention? Do you think that would increase the potential uptake in Ruby on Rails within large enterprises?

Maybe you are fearful of enterprisey folks actually contributing to Ruby on Rails because they may not only make it better they will make existing participants feel inferior. Ruby on Rails has potential but the first thing the community at large needs to work on is the separation of expertise from those who are allowed to speak.

Chris Petrilli wisely caught me suggesting that Ruby on Rails find their own equivalent to Richard Stallman and suggested that this was a bad idea. I said it just to get a rise out of folks but there is some truth in terms of my thinking. Stallman was successful in getting large enterprises whose primary business model isn't technology to embrace Linux. He not only stood for something, he does speak in the language of a civilized human and has others that are equally capable of doing the same.

On the other hand, the Ruby community has David Heinemieir Hansson who is knowledgable and amusing but otherwise detrimental to the long-term success of Ruby. Maybe the Ruby community should encourage him to take a back seat in terms of future communications and find someone with more polish. Maybe, he needs to figure out how to make himself and his presentations more enterprisey ready...

Check out this link and trackback with your thoughts...

For folks that will get it twisted, please read and memorize my disclaimer. Anyway, I ran across an interesting independent assessment of Ruby on Rails where the authors have documented the exact information I was looking for and they concluded that it should be dead last on the list. I wonder what David Heinemeier Hansson would say...,

I am guilty of something in which I usually accuse others of doing...



In several past blog entries, I have resorted to throwing daggers instead of encouraging a dialog and have been guilty of something that James Robertson does on a frequent basis. Instead, I need to do two things. First, I apologize at some level for being hostile and more importantly I hope that insight can emerge from the conversation so that readers within the blogosphere can learn from the best of the thought leaders.

So, if Chris and James are game, I would be ecstatic if they would provide their own perspectives on the following five questions?

• Consider this scenario, I decide to ask my employer, the Aetna (A Fortune Enterprise whose primary business isn't technology) as their new Chief Architect and I had the opportunity to choose a new language to write a brand new enterprise application that would be for a brand new line of business and needs to support 1,000 concurrent users via the Internet. Should I choose Java, SmallTalk or Ruby on Rails and why?


• The one thing that all three of us have in common is our personal perspectives of large industry analyst firms. Do you think we should instead of ignoring the problem start enlightening others? How about changing the conversation with folks in our own network to pay attention to analysts that do provide meaningful coverage? What would it take for you both today to add James Governor, Brenda Michelson and Raven Zachary to your blogroll?


• What is your thoughts on Indian outsourcing in general and specifically their ability to become successful in increasing the uptake of Ruby and/or SmallTalk within large enterprises?


• You have hinted in the past that folks in large enterprises tend not to share how they use particular technologies. As an insider, I think I have some ideas on how to get this story told but need for you both to point me towards large enterprises whose primary business model isn't technology who are using Ruby on Rails for mission-critical applications. I will take on the responsibility of figuring out how to get it published and help prove myself wrong in a very public way.


• I am guilty of using my blog as a bully pulpit to encourage folks to think about alternatives in their daily lives from charity to the human aspects of technology. What questions would you ask of me that are non-work related (Remember, my blog has absolutely zero to do with work) that I can provide an answer to?

Leaders have followers. If someone has followers, they are a leader. Management and leadership are not interchangable words. Magazines such as CIO when they talk about leadership are really talking about management. More importantly they tend to talk about what makes this person a leader (really a manager) rather than why do folks choose to follow which would be a more interesting question. I guess we can summarize this as yet another form of Substituting process for competency...



Consider the Roman Empire as the first so-called example of leadership. It was successful for a limited period of time because it made extensive use of slavery where followers were given commandments to follow the direction. Of course, it later was destroyed by the Goths also known as the free men.

The Roman empire has many emperors. Emperors appointed administrators. Administrators are simply folks in the middle that neither manage nor lead but simply and hopefully over time become competent at administration. The real revolution in Roman times came about because folks decided to not follow those administrators.

A leader is an equal whom you decide to follow on your own free will, because you think he can lead you. Does a corporal in the military on the battlefields in Iraq follow their Sargeant whom participated in previous conflicts because of his rank or because they feel they will be in a better place with him than without him? Now substitute the word Sargeant for the word Captain who just graduated from West Point with no experience but a lot of credentials, does the answer change?



Followers follow leaders because they have a vision that you believe is right. The one who more forward thinking is leading. Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right. Leaders manage attention through a compelling vision that brings others to a place they have not been before.

Some folks have in the past commented on the name of my blog: Thought Leadership and have changed the letter P to T for the amusement of many. The problem may be that leaders have visions that are consistent to the point that it becomes predictable, even by people who don't necessarily agree with it.

It would be amusing at some level if folks in the blogosphere started sharing stories on their boss and whether he/she is a leader or a manager. For me, I hope to in our next staff meeting at work, encourage my own boss to tell his own story in this regard in the blogosphere...

Good people in an excellent process with destroy great people in a poor process...



Do enterprise architects ever ask themselves whether their enterprises have great people? If they belief the answer is yes, then why aren't they working harder to capitalize on their most important asset vs focusing time and energy on all those mediocre at best folks?

Process can never replace talent yet most governance processes tend to encourage this thinking. Some enterprises comprimise their own greatness by only attempting to hire good people and put them into better processes. What would happen if they hired great people and allowed them to define their own processes (in a SoX compliant way of course)? Would America gain back its place in terms of competitive advantage?

The mediator process weenies that are infectious within our enterprises who seek out hybrid solutions will say that improvements to both process and people lead to improved output but never ask themselves which leads to more output. If enterprise architects worth their salt were allowed to kidnap the mediator types, the enterprise could start to recognize that peple play a far greater role than process and therefore this is where the focus should reside.

In previous blog entries, I mentioned my significant other is working on a startup idea in the IT security space. She realized that the task of development was more than she could accomplish alone and I simply don't have enough spare time to jump in, so she did her own homework on getting assistance in terms of development and realized that outsourcing to India is a bad idea...



For offshored research, China can't be beat, and this equally holds true for software, hardware and even business. Choose a metric, any metric: When it comes to research capabilities, China beats India. She did figure out that in terms of R&D that she should outsource the R (as in research) but not the D (as in development) to minimize nasty things such as disputes regarding intellectual property.

When comparing IIT to Tsinghua University, IIT is more branded but Tsinghua has more capability to make meaningful differences. She came to the conclusion that everything in India is simply too risky. China has not yet consumed all of its high-end talent unlike India where all the senior folks are spread thin and you are pretty much forced to work with junior folks who index themselves against other junior folks and rationalize themselves into seniority. We all know that rationalization is a trap.

The real benefit to outsourcing to China is not only in terms of the services they provide to you, but the opportunities it will bring for you to sell within the country itself. While both China's and India's economies are booming, the real question is which economy affords the best opportunity for American's to sell their goods and services in them and China clearly stands above India in this regard.

I wonder if I were to ask several of the CTOs who blog to point out software sales of their products within India and China, which country buys more? I think the answer is intuitive. Anyway, China also has lower billing rates and more importantly, the process of software development feels more agile than the India counterparts.

In observing other large enterprises, they always seem to be caught offguard when they say outsource 1,000 American IT jobs and it happens to turn into 2,000 plus jobs in India. There are many reasons for this ranging from the ability (or lack of) of top talent, the ratio of freshers to those with real experience, and the simple fact that most folks in corporate America actually play multiple roles (they just don't know it) while a developer in India has no incentive to play any role other than the one they are assigned.

My significant other thought deeply on the later and found that she couldn't simply hand off a task and expect folks to run with it and would otherwise be forced to pretty much define every thing in intricate detail with the resulting time taken to define things in writing being more time consuming than actually doing it herself. Her discovery said that the vast majority of folks in India simply haven't been permitted to understand the entire picture of any project but only encouraged to focus in on their part. She wants end-to-end solution design experience not just a butt in a seat.

In my own analysis of my significant other's conclusions, I asked myself, why haven't industry analysts who focus on outsourcing done research on this particular aspect?

Chris Petrilli is one blogger who seems genuine in terms of wanting to provide insight to others as to problems within the enterprise. I wonder what James Robertson and the SmallTalk jamboree could learn by reading what he is saying vs simply viewing it as an contrarian perspective to my own.



Chris posted a blog entitled: Shooting fish in a red barrel that was dead on. Chris and are 100% in agreement that large analyst firms are doing enterprises a disservice by us paying them to be smarter than us and to be ahead of the curve, not trail it by a decade. The better conversation though is not to simply acknowledge this as a problem but to brainstorm solutions.

If you acknowlege that you cant ween enterprisey folks away from reading analyst reports, yet the large analyst firms won't provide meaningful coverage of topics that matter then maybe the answer is we as a community of influential bloggers encourage enterprisey folks to get their research from smaller firms who will provide meaningful coverage. Maybe it starts with us enterprisey types encouraging other enterprisey types to start following analysts such as James Governor of Redmonk, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links and Raven Zachary of the 451 Group. Don't just acknowledge the problem, become part of the solution. Add these folks to your blogroll and encourage other bloggers to do the same.

In terms of Chris perspective on Indian outsourcing firms and the need to keep hundreds of thousands of folks employed noting that there probably isn't any incentive to increase productivity which has an effect of reducing billing, maybe we could also brainstorm some solutions to this problem space. You shouldn't be so fearful of folks who count lines of code as these types could actually become advocates to using Ruby on Rails. Enterprises love their metrics, so lets start aligning the Ruby on Rails story to this mindset. It afterall is very compelling through this lens.

I am glad in asking that can you name a Fortune 200 enterprise whose primary business isn't technology and their usage of rails that you responded but I would say that I didn't indicate a logical fallacy nor attempt to trap others in this regard. It may or may not exist, nobody knows at a public level which is more of the point than folks reading into my thinking that would hint that just because someone can't name it, it doesn't exist. That's kinda like the Ruby community calling me enterprisey simply because I believe that Ruby on Rails isn't enterprise ready.

Chris, I really wish you would expand on the notion of industry consensus as it is woofully understated. Do you know how many enterprise decisions are driven by what others are doing? For example, if Goldman Sachs were to publicize their usage of Ruby on Rails for trading applications, folks at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMChase, Citigroup, CSFB and others would definetely stand-up and pay attention.

Part of an EA's job is to index their enterprise against others. I do this on a daily basis from a security perspective and monitor what others are up to. Likewise, I have folks from other enterprises within my own vertical ping me to use what we are doing as an advanced form of name dropping. This actually carries even more weight than any analyst firm could ever hope for.

Do you know how many enterprises within our vertical started to adopt Liferay Enterprise Portal after they learned what I was up to? The same thing can be said for when me and my peers started openly talking about how we do Service-Oriented Architectures. One can attack this behavior to the amusement of outsiders or one can be more thoughtful and figure out how to align with it to their advantage. I would rather see Ruby become wildly successful by doing the later and ignoring the James Robertson and his inciteful commentary that provides zero value to anyone on either side.

Large enterprises have quirky behaviors on which Dilbert makes his living on making fun of. James Robertson tends to like to point out the stupidity of enterprises but never offers up any solutions as to how both parties can participate. I guess playing the game of win/lose is something he is good at. After all, he champions SmallTalk in which the vast majority of enterprises have already expressed their opinions on and have delegated it a second-class citizen behind Java and even COBOL. If the right thing happens Ruby on Rails will take an implementation leadership position over Smalltalk in 2007 further frustrating those whose job is to evangelize selling Evian to a drowning man Smalltalk.

I do though find a comment left in your blog by Dilip as interesting and begs the question of should we edit our blogs so as to not insult folks. Honestly, I would be disappointed in if you did as while highly offensive is more accurate than not. Chris keep up the good work and thumbs up for keeping the conversation honest...

Chris Petrilli is one blogger who seems genuine in terms of wanting to provide insight to others as to problems within the enterprise. I wonder what James Robertson and the SmallTalk jamboree could learn by reading what he is saying vs simply viewing it as an contrarian perspective to my own.



Chris posted a blog entitled: Shooting fish in a red barrel that was dead on. Chris and are 100% in agreement that large analyst firms are doing enterprises a disservice by us paying them to be smarter than us and to be ahead of the curve, not trail it by a decade. The better conversation though is not to simply acknowledge this as a problem but to brainstorm solutions.

If you acknowlege that you cant ween enterprisey folks away from reading analyst reports, yet the large analyst firms won't provide meaningful coverage of topics that matter then maybe the answer is we as a community of influential bloggers encourage enterprisey folks to get their research from smaller firms who will provide meaningful coverage. Maybe it starts with us enterprisey types encouraging other enterprisey types to start following analysts such as James Governor of Redmonk, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links and Raven Zachary of the 451 Group. Don't just acknowledge the problem, become part of the solution. Add these folks to your blogroll and encourage other bloggers to do the same.

In terms of Chris perspective on Indian outsourcing firms and the need to keep hundreds of thousands of folks employed noting that there probably isn't any incentive to increase productivity which has an effect of reducing billing, maybe we could also brainstorm some solutions to this problem space. You shouldn't be so fearful of folks who count lines of code as these types could actually become advocates to using Ruby on Rails. Enterprises love their metrics, so lets start aligning the Ruby on Rails story to this mindset. It afterall is very compelling through this lens.

I am glad in asking that can you name a Fortune 200 enterprise whose primary business isn't technology and their usage of rails that you responded but I would say that I didn't indicate a logical fallacy nor attempt to trap others in this regard. It may or may not exist, nobody knows at a public level which is more of the point than folks reading into my thinking that would hint that just because someone can't name it, it doesn't exist. That's kinda like the Ruby community calling me enterprisey simply because I believe that Ruby on Rails isn't enterprise ready.

Chris, I really wish you would expand on the notion of industry consensus as it is woofully understated. Do you know how many enterprise decisions are driven by what others are doing? For example, if Goldman Sachs were to publicize their usage of Ruby on Rails for trading applications, folks at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMChase, Citigroup, CSFB and others would definetely stand-up and pay attention.

Part of an EA's job is to index their enterprise against others. I do this on a daily basis from a security perspective and monitor what others are up to. Likewise, I have folks from other enterprises within my own vertical ping me to use what we are doing as an advanced form of name dropping. This actually carries even more weight than any analyst firm could ever hope for.

Do you know how many enterprises within our vertical started to adopt Liferay Enterprise Portal after they learned what I was up to? The same thing can be said for when me and my peers started openly talking about how we do Service-Oriented Architectures. One can attack this behavior to the amusement of outsiders or one can be more thoughtful and figure out how to align with it to their advantage. I would rather see Ruby become wildly successful by doing the later and ignoring the James Robertson and his inciteful commentary that provides zero value to anyone on either side.

Large enterprises have quirky behaviors on which Dilbert makes his living on making fun of. James Robertson tends to like to point out the stupidity of enterprises but never offers up any solutions as to how both parties can participate. I guess playing the game of win/lose is something he is good at. After all, he champions SmallTalk in which the vast majority of enterprises have already expressed their opinions on and have delegated it a second-class citizen behind Java and even COBOL. If the right thing happens Ruby on Rails will take an implementation leadership position over Smalltalk in 2007 further frustrating those whose job is to evangelize selling Evian to a drowning man Smalltalk.

I do though find a comment left in your blog by Dilip as interesting and begs the question of should we edit our blogs so as to not insult folks. Honestly, I would be disappointed in if you did as while highly offensive is more accurate than not. Chris keep up the good work and keeping the conversation honest...

Chris Petrilli is one blogger who seems genuine in terms of wanting to provide insight to others as to problems within the enterprise. I wonder what James Robertson and the SmallTalk jamboree could learn by reading what he is saying vs simply viewing it as an contrarian perspective to my own.



Chris posted a blog entitled: Shooting fish in a red barrel that was dead on. Chris and are 100% in agreement that large analyst firms are doing enterprises a disservice by us paying them to be smarter than us and to be ahead of the curve, not trail it by a decade. The better conversation though is not to simply acknowledge this as a problem but to brainstorm solutions.

If you acknowlege that you cant ween enterprisey folks away from reading analyst reports, yet the large analyst firms won't provide meaningful coverage of topics that matter then maybe the answer is we as a community of influential bloggers encourage enterprisey folks to get their research from smaller firms who will provide meaningful coverage. Maybe it starts with us enterprisey types encouraging other enterprisey types to start following analysts such as James Governor of Redmonk, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links and Raven Zachary of the 451 Group. Don't just acknowledge the problem, become part of the solution. Add these folks to your blogroll and encourage other bloggers to do the same.

In terms of Chris perspective on Indian outsourcing firms and the need to keep hundreds of thousands of folks employed noting that there probably isn't any incentive to increase productivity which has an effect of reducing billing, maybe we could also brainstorm some solutions to this problem space. You shouldn't be so fearful of folks who count lines of code as these types could actually become advocates to using Ruby on Rails. Enterprises love their metrics, so lets start aligning the Ruby on Rails story to this mindset. It afterall is very compelling through this lens.

I am glad in asking that can you name a Fortune 200 enterprise whose primary business isn't technology and their usage of rails that you responded but I would say that I didn't indicate a logical fallacy nor attempt to trap others in this regard. It may or may not exist, nobody knows at a public level which is more of the point than folks reading into my thinking that would hint that just because someone can't name it, it doesn't exist. That's kinda like the Ruby community calling me enterprisey simply because I believe that Ruby on Rails isn't enterprise ready.

Chris, I really wish you would expand on the notion of industry consensus as it is woofully understated. Do you know how many enterprise decisions are driven by what others are doing? For example, if Goldman Sachs were to publicize their usage of Ruby on Rails for trading applications, folks at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMChase, Citigroup, CSFB and others would definetely stand-up and pay attention.

Part of an EA's job is to index their enterprise against others. I do this on a daily basis from a security perspective and monitor what others are up to. Likewise, I have folks from other enterprises within my own vertical ping me to use what we are doing as an advanced form of name dropping. This actually carries even more weight than any analyst firm could ever hope for.

Do you know how many enterprises within our vertical started to adopt Liferay Enterprise Portal after they learned what I was up to? The same thing can be said for when me and my peers started openly talking about how we do Service-Oriented Architectures. One can attack this behavior to the amusement of outsiders or one can be more thoughtful and figure out how to align with it to their advantage. I would rather see Ruby become wildly successful by doing the later and ignoring the James Robertson and his inciteful commentary that provides zero value to anyone on either side.

Large enterprises have quirky behaviors on which Dilbert makes his living on making fun of. James Robertson tends to like to point out the stupidity of enterprises but never offers up any solutions as to how both parties can participate. I guess playing the game of win/lose is something he is good at. After all, he champions SmallTalk in which the vast majority of enterprises have already expressed their opinions on and have delegated it a second-class citizen behind Java and even COBOL. If the right thing happens Ruby on Rails will take an implementation leadership position over Smalltalk in 2007 further frustrating those whose job is to evangelize selling Evian to a drowning man Smalltalk.

I do though find a comment left in your blog by Dilip as interesting and begs the question of should we edit our blogs so as to not insult folks. Honestly, I would be disappointed in if you did as while highly offensive is more accurate than not. Chris keep up the good work and keeping the conversation honest...