Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

Word of Pie commented on Technology Standards for the Enterprise, Getting Too Much Attention and I figured I would deconstruct his position...

You would think that with stumbling all over standards, I wouldn’t be concerned. The basic problem is that when I talk to other people in the ECM world, standards never comes up.

I hope that you will consider mentioning it yourself instead of sitting back waiting for others to discuss?

Well, standards that are so ingrained that we never talk about them is a great goal, but we are on the other side of the mountain. We have yet to define and implement any standards in such a way that we can take them from granted and do more real work and less scut-work.

OK, so at least we acknowledge that standards at some level can aid in productivity?

I think the reason is quite simple, standards isn’t sexy and cool in the ECM world yet.

I wonder if this proves my hypothesis that 99.9% of all folks in the ECM domain not only have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to paying attention to advances in software architecture but simply aren't even capable of cloning what has been successful for others before them?

My main take-away? EMC is involved in the standards process. They are part of the expert group for the Java Content Repository 1.0 (JSR-170) and the early draft state of the JCP 2.0 version (JSR-283). Not much of a take-away.

Not sure what to say about this except that not all problems can be solved via Java and therefore standards are required in other courts. How about not duplicating your own identity store and leveraging Active Directory and no I am not talking about authentication, I am talking about binding for profile-oriented information at runtime. How about standards around SOA? How hard would it be to come up with a common WSDL?

What does this all mean to us now??? Absolutely nothing. Let’s face it, until there is an actual standard that isn’t going to be replaced in a couple of years, how can we expect EMC or any other leading vendor to implement standards?

I would love to understand your definition of leading? It feels like there are no leaders in this domain. If your definition of leading is to take a sole individual who is mentally retarded, put him in a round room and tell him to find the corner then I say you are spot on.

We need an upstart company, or a determined user community, to force the established vendors to implement standards. Until then, I guess I am going to have to start helping draw attention to the need for utilizing standards in the ECM world.

If you think it is about an upstart company then we are already off to a bad start. I would consider Alfresco an upstart yet they haven't even attempted to champion any form of standards in their domain. They are probably focused more on survival which says that you spend your money on things like sales folks instead of developers working with standards bodies.

Could we at least acknowledge that ECM isn't a standalone domain and that other domains such as CRM, BPM, ESB and ERP may also need to integrate? If a vendor were to stop paying attention to all those little trees and noticed that the forest is quite big, they may have the opportunity to sell even more of their product. Ask yourself, do you believe if Alfreso where the first vendor to have integration with Salesforce.com via sforce APIs that they could generate additional buzz which could turn into sales? If Alfresco where to pay attention to security requirements, could they become a strong contender in the enterprise space for e-discovery compliance?

Not to sound hostile, but I am glad that you acknowledged your own responsibility in the need to help start drawing attention for standards in the ECM world. Lets see if we can figure out others who can participate and together we can all be successful...