Thursday, August 23, 2007
Links for 2007-08-23
Doesn't he know that crime doesn't pay?
Alan pelz-sharpe is one of the few analysts that truly understands the ECM marketplace at large and specifically the needs of large enterprises. If you use Stellent, Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Nuxeo or Alfresco and don't read his blog frequently and with passion, you are missing out. I suspect that Alan in his next blog entry will discuss not just measuring but techniques to increase usage of ECM platforms and how they can play within an SOA
I am in full agreement with Neil Macehiter that attempting to calculate ROI on an SOA upfront is a big waste of time. The funny thing though is that different enterprises have different approaches to calculating ROI as there is no standard way to calculate. Some enterprises allow for the capture of avoided costs while others don't. Some enterprises include cost of inflation and the decreasing value of cash while others don't and so on. The funny thing though is if you ask any software vendor in any domain to provide a template for calculating ROI, they will always show a great return no matter what numbers you feed it.
James Tarbell is an interesting individual whom face-to-face conversations are always rewarding. I do suggest that you periodically read his blog and encourage him to interact with the larger community more
Brian Huff is one of the most thoughtful ECM individuals I know. I was recently thinking that ECM folks also don't think in terms of patterns. There are architecture patterns, design patterns, workflow patterns, SOA patterns, security patterns, antipatterns, J2EE patterns, enterprise integration patterns and so on but I haven't ran across any documented ECM patterns. Is this something that Billy Cripe, John Newton, Craig Randall and others feel like they could collaborate on?
It is good to see that analysts are actually capable of having their own opinions. Usually this requires more than babbling about the need for business buy-in, having a strong ROI and other uncommon common sense pontifications done by large analyst firms. For the record, I would like to say that SOA is an expense and leave it at that. Go to the corporate library of a 200 year old company and you may find that they had at one time a Vice President of Electricity. Nowadays, electricity is taken for granted and is otherwise an expense that folks simply pay for and SOA will follow this path in the next couple of years. In the same way you don't ask for approval from the electric company to plug in your refridgerator, you shouldn't be necessarily asking the business to listen to your sales pitch regarding SOA
