Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

Women periodically hit the glass ceiling which prevents them from rising to their fullest potential. I believe that folks in IT have the notion of a glass wall which prevents many of them from expanding into other fields, not because they lack the ability, but because they lack relevant experience...



When I reflect on my own career, I realize that in the workplace, I am only as good as I was in the past and no one ever took the time out to truly understand my potential. The past is my shackles and I need to figure out how to become more than myself. One of the things that I have realized is that while I enjoy being an Enterprise Architect for my own employer, I have no desire to be an Enterprise Architect for anyone else.

Recruiters in large enterprises are tasked with hiring someone who is a good match for a job opening. This of course places too much emphasis on experience as opposed to ability. When hiring someone, an obvious starting point is their resume which naturally causes a focus on what someone has done in the past while not paying attention to what they aspire to become. Have enterprises ever figured out that if you know I do a kick butt job at Enterprise Architecture, how successful I may be if I were able to truly focus on something I really was passionate about?

If enterprises are truly serious about hiring top talent, they need to pay attention to the future, especially for those who are setting the strategic direction. Do you know how many positions I have interviewed for in the past where the focus was on strategy let they didn't ask a single question on where I wanted to head? Way too many.

What if recruiters were to stop thinking about resumes as a document that outlines ones pedigree and history while encouraging candidates to list their aspirations instead? Do you think this may lead to finding better talent? The funny thing is that not a week goes by where I don't get a ping from multiple recruiters seeking to find enterprise architects. In networking with them, I find it interesting that they are pursuing a dry waterhole in that they have never even figured out from the folks they are recruiting on behalf of how much training would they be willing to accept in a near match.

While my resume is transparent and unadulterated, I can certainly tell you that history does lie. Have you considered that the best way to learn about an individual is to simply ask them what they want to do in the future and what they aspire to become? You may even realize that candidates may tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

I have in the past ranted about being in mail jail where the quota was exceeded on Microsoft Exchange and I couldn't send email until I got rid of all of those PDFs that software vendors keep sending me as attachments. Anyway, the secondary cause for folks spending time on email management is the CC his manager antipattern...



Sometimes, folks in large enterprises prove the theory that we are all just a bunch of silly little human beings. There are times where we in our matrixed organization chart where you report to everyone and no one at the same time need the services of others in a timely manner, but the person on the other end of the email doesn't respond. Of course, this too may be because they are also in mail jail but the odds are good that it is more likely they are ignoring your requests or believe it to be of less priority.

Folks over time have concluded that the best way around this conundrum is to CC his manager and put this person's boss in mail jail as well. The recipient of the email may feel pressured to respond and will answer the email also CC'ing his manager but will make sure that all future requests take longer than they should. He may also respond faster than he should and think about where in the hierarchy the person asking the request is vs responding in terms of its actual importance which means they are spending time on less important activities.

Furthermore, his manager may have a blackberry and may be reading emails in meetings where thinly veiled Powerpoint presentations are being conducted by closed source vendors and will send the recipient another email indicating its importance. The end result is that the recipient now has to spend time on five or six emails to get himself out of mail jail before he can take care of your request.

Everything is important, but sometimes us folks in large enterprises can't figure out what is more important...

I wonder if folks in the ECM world have ever read about Compliance Oriented Architectures as written by James Governor of Redmonk?



Both Laurence Hart and Jesse Wilkins said something in their blog that got me thinking about the importance of disposition and how it too can become a service. While the original discussion was all about IDARS, Alchemy and Documentum, I came to the conclusion that retention is not only something that should be part of an ECM platform and not a separate SKU but that this too needs to move away from the ECM-oriented insular thinking and migrate to be service-oriented.

Of course, I am of the belief that Enterprise Architects at Morgan Stanley in terms of their records management initiative are more than likely focused on productecture and consumed by features instead of architecture and thinking about how disposition fits within a larger context, but I will of course allow folks from that enterprise to chime in and provide their own perspective to readers in the blogosphere.

Let's consider the scenario where I am an Enterprise Architect for State Farm and I have three different platforms. I have a policy administration system, a claims administration system and my wonderful proprietary closed source ECM platform with horrific WSDL. From a retention perspective, I may want to have a retention policy for my policy administration system that says keep all insurance policies for cat insurance for two years after policy expiration unless they are in the state of Wisconsin and know how to bark which we want to keep them for four years after policy expiration.

Likewise, I may want to have a policy for my claims administration system that says to keep all claims information related to cat insurance for nine years or until the cat runs out of nine lives. Of course the claims administration system may not want the policy administration system to remove its information especially if the claim is still active.

From an ECM perspective, one could envision that the policy administration system stored pictures of cats, their favorite toys and the application they filled out prior to getting the policy which may have included their favorite food and whether they like catnip. It may even store audio of cats who know how to bark. One could also envision that the claim administration system also leverages the ECM platform and would store pictures of the cat being chased up the tree by Clifford and Blue.

If you think of this business scenario, you may conclude:

• ECM is not an insular domain and should participate in a larger context


• While the notion of retention has been built into ECM, it really is a larger problem


• ECM platforms should consider the fact that retention rules should not be proprietary but ideally described in an open, portable way as other systems may also need to consume them


• To get retention right, ECM platforms may not only need to expose retention functionality, but the platforms themselves may need to consume other services to get it 100% correct


• Retention is not about ACL++ but more about business rules. Maybe this is an an opportunity to incorporate algorithms such as RETE into ECM


• If you look at the horrific WSDL being created by ECM vendors, this couldn't be accomplished as the interfaces don't account for this business scenario


• Documentum, Alfresco, Nuxeo, Stellent, Filenet, OpenText and others are way too insular and need to start thinking more about how folks outside the ECM domain may use their products.

Laurence Hart provides wonderful insight into the RM world and is an insightful read for others...

RM capabilities should be built into any ECM platform... final disposition needs to be a built-in part of the platform. I believe all, and I am open to correction here, ECM vendors charge separately for retention and RM functionality, if they even have it split into two products.

Any thoughts on whether disposition when it is more about destruction could leverage external encryption services? For example, if Documentum were deeply integrated with Active Directory and could leverage its certificate services, documents could be destroyed simply by destroying the keys required to decrypt them. Of course this begs two questions of the first being coming up with better integration between ECM and PKI and more importantly, the various ECM vendors thinking about integration with products other than what originates from their own company. Maybe they need to first understand that SOA is not the golden hammer for integration.

The other thought that I had is this feels like an opportunity for Alfresco and Nuxeo to take marketshare away from Documentum and Stellent. The separate SKU sales pattern feels fugly when it should be a feature of an existing product and not something distinct as it cannot standalone on its own.

Many people will still go with RM as tracks those paper records that James mentions and people still need CYA. However, it can lead an organization down a rabbit hole if they look at two products, RPS and RM, and pick the term Gartner uses to define the problem.

I wonder if Laurence believes the rat hole is in the products or in listening to Gartner? I wonder why the likes of Nick Patience of the 451 Group, Alan Pelz-Sharpe or other industry analysts haven't researched this aspect deeper?

He defined RM with the 20 year old definition focused around paper.

Actually, it wasn't my definition but one I learned from another architect. It did include Microfilm and COLD devices as well. The hard part of this conversation is that I understand how RM and ECM are complimentary, but I still have no sense as to what the gaps are? What features does Alchemy have that Documentum doesn't and vice versa? Jesse Wilkins describes retention policies which feel like they are more strongly typed metadata in ECM. Does this beg for an industry taxonomy of metadata? The issue at hand is that if retention is solely driven off the ECM system being authorative then you could get it wrong.

Imagine a scenario where you have a BPM system and an ECM system integrated where documents are in the ECM and processes are in the BPM. Shouldn't you be able to via some industry standard that is implemented in all products be able to say that all documents are disposed of when the business process reaches a certain state without fugly syncronization?

I still find it intriguing when IT executives don't understand how to recruit and more importantly retain top talent...



The notion of the exit interview seems like the latest fad that has gone without accompanying common sense. Why wait till the absolute last minute to solicit feedback from someone who has zero vested interest when you can seek feedback from those who still care? What if enterprises figured out not only a way to measure sentiment before folks depart but did it in such a way that it actually had integrity?

For example, I crafted several questions that if asked to developers within your enterprise, you may actually learn something:

1. All other considerations being equal, what characteristic represents the ideal boss?
   
   (a) A respected industry guru such as Martin Fowler, James Gosling, Chris Date, etc
   (b) Someone who is passionate about community, bold in their communication and savage in the pursuit of excellence which includes individuals such as Todd Biske, James Governor or Brenda Michelson
   (c) Someone from a project management background who has never written a single line of code in their life and doesn't care to learn, but is keenly interested in process maturity such as CMM and Six Sigma


2. Does the ideal boss focus on?
   
   (a)Technical excellence and demonstrated ability
   (b) Perception management
   (c) Process as a substitute for competence



3. Does your boss understand that top talent wants to work with other top talent?
   (a) Top talent is just another management buzzword
   (b) Top talent is something he pursues but due to outsourcing no one wants to work there
   (c) While outsourcing is important, gaining access to top talent is more important and acknowledges that outsourcing removes much of the desired collaboration

I just finished writing the last recommendation for a good friend and blogger who is applying to several top MBA programs and must say that writing a good recommendation is one of the hardest things one can do.

At some level, one gets engaged at more of a personal level in that I want to see him accomplish his goals and know that some small part of it is tied to my own writing abilities. While I am flattered that he chose me to write his recommendations, at some level the pressure is tough. I will of course second guess myself until the acceptance letter arrives, but at least their is solitude in knowing that I have tried my best...

While I am all for having a sense of urgency, I can certainly tell you that folks don't think faster under pressure...



Have you ever reflected on your days in college? Would you have learned more if you had two weeks for every week of work assigned? Why do project managers think that pressure helps? Have they considered that putting stress on others causes suboptimal work that jeopardizes the longer term goal of strategic projects?

People only think fast when the anxiety level is self-imposed. Otherwise, the problem of pressure will merely be reflected back in the direction over time to the person applying it. Simply put, anxiety is not the optimal mental state for clear thinking over longer periods of time. In fact, it more than likely jeopardizes any scintilla of planning that does occur.

Maybe project managers and IT executives have gotten it twisted by reading too many books about sports. We all wanna be like Mike, a team player like Tim Duncan or even hit home runs like Barry BondsHank Aaron but reality says that us enterprise architects need to encourage our bosses to put down the sports management books. Physical performance may be a different thing entirely. That's why managerial techniques that may work for sports or physical labor backfire when applied to software development.

An important time-management and stress-management technique is to set priorities, and then address each task in a focused-but-unhurried manner. You can never do everything you want/should, so focus on the tasks that have the biggest payoff. Trying to "work harder" doesn't pay off. Why can't focus understand the simple concept of not working harder, but smarter?

Laurence Hart comments on the need for increased transparency and how ECM and SOA should converge...

My fear, as a Documentum practitioner, is simple. What if Documentum becomes all about the platform and neglects the client components?

The server side of many ECM platforms still leave a lot to be desired. I agree with Laurence is terms of the importance of continuous improvement for client APIs but wonder which is more important?

Oracle’s Billy Cripe writes that many users would be perfectly happy having their ECM platform supporting their other applications. However, sometimes that takes work. An ECM SOA standard may help with that, but right now, there is still benefit to be had by having Content Applications that are business problem focused.

Yes, all good architectures take work and ECM vendors shouldn't be so hesitant to do a little bit. Have they heard of the notion of merciless refactoring? Maybe we can talk about why ECM vendors understaff their development teams as a separate discussion.

Records Management, Collaboration, Web Content Management, and others center around content, and it makes sense to have versions of those applications that can tightly integrate with an ECM platform

Jesse Wilkins is a big proponent of records management and has mentioned concepts such as IDARS and products such as Alchemy. I wonder what features does Alchemy have that is missing from Stellent and Documentum?

Here is the Catch-22. We need an ECM platform that can easily be plugged into an Enterprise Architecture. On the other hand, we like having good, solid Content Applications from the same vendor. Oh, there are times we want/need to mix and match, but many organizations want to at least be able to consider the applications provided by the ECM vendor. It also shows an understanding of the problems that the ECM Platform needs to support.

I don't believe it is as much as a catch-22 as it is a trap. The issue at hand is that there are more customers that want to integrate with products NOT from the ECM vendor than there are that do. The issue is that ECM vendors have been ignoring the desires of their customers and prioritize based on insular internal interactions over talking with others in the value chain.

ECM 2.0
Jed Cawthorne asks what ECM 2.0 will look like. I am of the belief that it will look no different than ECM 1.0. Security will still be weak. There will be no interoperability and vendors in this space still will create horrific WSDL. 2.0 in the ECM world will be more of a branding exercise than a value proposition.

Managing tough security projects
In my travels, I have heard dozens of folks talk about the difficulty of rolling out identity management tools where one of the biggest problems is in how the tools make you jump through hoops, don't support all the products an enterprise has and most importantly don't interoperate very well with existing security managers such as RACF, ADAM, etc. I wonder when transparency in conversation around tools from Sun, Oracle, BMC and others will occur in the blogosphere?

40% of today's enterprise architecture programs will be stopped
My peers in other enterprises are too busy having coffee clutch conversations with their business partners and focusing on perception management while not paying the needed attention to ROI. Sooner or later, many programs will be shut down and I will be esctatic when it happens.

New Rules for SOA
I love the quote, SOA is not EA. The problem though is if folks realize what SOA truly is, the sales of vendor projects may go way way down and they will have to hype something else in order to stay in business.

Architecture Tweets
The notion of the skip-level is simply fugly when enterprise architects participate. The funny thing is in prior conversations with one of the large enterprises across the street, I remember a couple of EAs telling me that they have never talked to their VP whereas a week doesn't go buy where I haven't chatted with at least one SVP. The notion of skip levels need to be shot and we need to help executives communicate downward better.

Paying for SOA
More discussions around the economic model for SOA need to occur in the blogosphere.

Six sure fire ways to sink your enterprise architecture
Brenda Michelson, noted industry analyst of Elemental Links calls out us enterprise architects. Maybe in a future blog entry, she can talk more about point five and how it compares/contrasts with perception management which is so freakin disgustingpopular nowadays.

450 analyst firms get less than half their revenue from vendors
If vendors are frustrated with paying Gartner higher fees while they also feel that analysts lack deep domain knowledge, the question is why aren't they seeking alternatives? If you want to understand the mindset of an enterprise buyer, why not simply post questions in your blog and pay a bounty in the form of a charitable contribution to a worthy charity for whomever from a large enterprise responds?

You can keep your business language: that's not meaningful conversation
I wonder if James Governor understands at some level that folks in large enterprises are increasingly being encouraged to have less meaningful conversations by speaking in the tone of the business language. According to sage wisdom, this helps IT align with the business. I of course believe we are giving the business the business

Responding to the most thoughtful post of Jesse Wilkins...

James argues that IDARS has nothing to do with records management and is more about report management. I think there's a relation between IDARS and RM on the one hand and between IDARS and ERM (enterprise report management) on the other - but these are neither complete nor exclusive.

As stated, I am going on what I have learned from others which leads me to believe that there is no common definition for what even comprises records management.

for example in the case of federated records management. It's used to put a control framework around those records so that items declared as records cannot be edited or deleted prior to the expiration of the retention period, which is itself assigned according to the legal, administrative, fiscal, and historical value of the records.

I would love to understand why this is any different than simply placing Access Control Lists on stuff stored in Documentum, Alfresco, Nuxeo or Stellent?

For those documents where the paper is not mandated to be kept, I agree that a better approach is to scan everything of value into e.g. Documentum or FileNet. I also agree that there are significant drawbacks with microfilm, including time to create, time to retrieve, need for controlled climate storage, etc.

Jesse only mentioned the big enterprisey guys and didn't mention open source players such as Nuxeo or even pseudo open source players such as Alfresco. I wonder if he is pro or con towards open source?

But with electronic storage comes another issue: preservation. CAD drawings, Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDFs....none of these will last the lifespan of a building, or of a 787, or even more than 10 years, due to media lifespan, hardware availability, and software compatibility issues.

You are now crossing into a space that security folks understand which is the notion of retention policies. I would argue though that enterprises keep too much information and need to start figuring out how to delete things to make the need for records management go away.

Here's where I think James misses the RM boat. An enterprise that relegates effective records management - including policies, processes, skills, AND technology enablers - to 996th out of 1000 will almost assuredly end up regretting it, and that sooner than later.

For folks who will get it twisted, I didn't say that this was the priority of my organization or am I recommending anyone else to think about it this way. I am merely stating what it in terms of the priority of my particular agenda.

For those interested in much more information about records management and its practice regardless of the media used to store records, visit ARMA International (formerly the Association of Records Managers and Administrators) at http://www.arma.org. Again in the interests of full disclosure, I sit on the ARMA International Board of Directors. Their annual meeting and conference is Oct 7-10 in Baltimore, MD;

Is anyone on the agenda going to talk about interoperability between records management systems? Any conversations about creating open source to solve the challenges in the records management space? Will there be conversations solely focused on those who are somewhat indoctrinated and otherwise insular or will the conversation be more focused on those outsiders such as myself where we can figure out how to incorporate it into enterprise architecture?

Awhile back, I made a comment on records management that wasn't quite accurate. Figured I would take this opportunity to correct myself...



I am surprised that Jesse Wilkins didn't call me out. My mention of IDARS as I have now learned really has nothing to do with records management and fits into a space that Gartner refers to as report management. As I understand, records management is more about tracking physical paper and there are applications that help manage this.

A records management application may know that my job application is in box 742, on shelf C, in aisle 23, in building 22. It may track retention and disposition status for lots of paper-oriented processes.

One of the things that I think this dialog should contain is whether records management even makes sense nowadays. Why do folks still keep paper? Why can't they simply scan all documents and store within an ECM repository such as Stellent, Alfreso or Documentum? Why aren't folks simply converting from micro-film and all of the headaches around climate control that it brings and moving more of it into the data center?

In terms of the thousands of applications a large enterprise may have, I have placed the notion of records management, in terms of its relative importance in the 996th position in a three-way tie with the application used by our employee fitness center along with the application the folks in the cafeteria use to keep track of employees who loose change in the vending machines. This reminds me to figure out if Gartner has a magic quadrant for lost change management applications?

I find it intriguing that in my travels, I haven't ran across a single Enterprise Architect who even cares about this space. I wonder what we are missing?

James Governor of Redmonk said something intriguing that resonated with me. It was: If Markets are Conversations then Twitter is Money which got me to thinking about how Twitter can be used within an enterprise setting and how I may leverage it for my industry vertical identity management consortium I am attempting to get off the ground...



James stated:

I long ago came to the conclusion its impossible to truly engage with more than 200 bloggers. That, after all, is the size of a village, and the natural limit to our legacy brains, unaccustomed as they are to the I/O requirements of the utterly connected age.

His statement isn't just limited to bloggers but to folks who are practicing enterprise architecture in large corporations. We are constantly being pressured to extend our sphere of influence which has a dilution effect on our quality of conversation at the expense of perception management. There is a fine balance between reaching out to other demographics within the enterprise and staying more insular so as to have maximum impact.

The 80/20 rule comes to mind in that enterprise architects shouldn't focus on everything and likewise industry analysts need to stop sending out surveys to IT executives attempting to measure where the gaps reside. Sometimes having gaps is a good thing. Everything and everyone is important but who is more important?

James goes on to state:

The Power of Small Teams: Gore tries to keep its teams small (and caps even its manufacturing plants at 200 people). That way, everyone can get to know one another and work together with minimal rules, as though they were a task force tackling a crisis.

It has been a long, long time since I have personally advocated for the creation of small, highly nimble teams that are empowered. Somewhere along the way, I have lost my soul and will be vigilant in terms of getting it back. Today, we are so indoctrinated and bought into the notion of governance that we forget about the core principles we should all adhere to. The law of large numbers gets in the way of us remembering that we are just silly human beings that want peace, love and prosperity.

James then mentions

Make Time for Face Time: There’s no hierarchical chain of command; anyone in the company can talk to anyone else. Gore discourages memos and prefers in-person communication to email.

It is sad, as I have been so heads down on my current activities that I truly haven't had a meaningful face-to-face conversation in the last several weeks. Now is the time that many folks in large enterprises are preparing for their 2008 budget and get consumed by tweaking numbers, creating over-hyped sales pitches, flooding each other with emails and otherwise forgetting about the human on the other end.

There are lots of benefits to face-to-face conversations. While they take longer and most certain put pressure on the elusive work-life balance, it does help reduce the headache of managing your email inbox, especially if your shop institutes mailbox size quotas. Now I know why I am always in mail jail...

Folks need to "manage" the physical, sociological, spiritual, and perceptual. However, many IT executives under the guise of IT aligning with the business will spend nearly all of their time managing only the perceptual. Companies that practice this look quite good in the eyes of the business, but rot away internally.



At its highest level of immaturity, perception is reality tends to breed communication patterns where employees are told what they want to hear instead of what is actually happening. Metrics are created left and right as a flag waving exercise to show that transparency is the goal but if you look carefully, the metrics measure activity and not value. The funny thing is that the business side of the house as consumers of most metrics receive them but neither understand nor challenge. In reality, IT won't get better and expenses will continue to rise relative to the value provided unless business folks have the ability to tell the difference between when IT is lying or when they are truly going out of their way to meet business expectations.

I wonder how many executives understand what those below them think in terms of how they are perceived? Are modern IT executives merely facades for those that came before them? Nowadays, it isn't too difficult to find an IT executive who focuses on the following in increasing amount of time but in decreasing order of importance:

• how they appear to others
• how their department appears to others
• how their organization appears to others

If you study the behavior models of those who evangelize perception is reality, you may hear them talking about innovation and how they are the linchpin to making it happen within the enterprise, but reality tells a different story. If you were to look at history, the innovators of the past have had less of a perception mindset and more of an engineering mindset where their focus wasn't on perception and in all reality had a totally different set of priorities. At some level, they thought about things in terms of importance as follows:

• making things
• making things that work
• making things that are useful

Maybe what is wrong with modern IT is that IT executives forgot the simple fact that they need engineers to make things and the sole focus isn't just on making thinly veiled PowerPoint presentations. If you also look back to the days when IT was cheap, you would realize that there were more engineers than perception-oriented folks. Likewise, if you were to plot when IT expenses started to grow faster than revenue, you may discover the time when IT executives started focusing on perception and thinking that if they don't like what engineers are telling them, then they can just go get another.

People skills are important, but not more important than engineering skills within an IT culture. People skills are nothing more than knowing how to appear good to others. We have to do something about the death march downward spiral of spending time and effort acquiring people skills as it means we are obviously focusing less on learning science and making things well which can only result in increased IT spend and less competitive advantage...

I may be visiting three cities in India in the January timeframe to speak on various aspects of SOA within a large enterprise. It looks like my agenda will be comprised of visiting Chennai, Bangalore and Pune. I would love the opportunity while there to meetup with a diverse set of bloggers to have a face to face conversation. While I am there, I would love to meet bloggers from diverse backgrounds that work for Indian outsourcing firms such as Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam and TCS who are also christian, muslim, buddhist and jewish. Likewise, I would love to meet women who blog, those that are Dalits and even those of whose preferences do not align with my own. Nothing personal against those Brahmin class male Hindu's, but I probably won't have to make any effort to meet you folks.



Anyway, whenever I travel to another country I haven't previously been to, I tend to think of this as yet another opportunity for charity. If there are any projects in these countries that are sponsored by any of the large Indian corporations analogous to our Habitat for Humanity, where they are building homes for the poor, I would most certainly love to swing a hammer and do my small part. Likewise, I wouldn't also mind volunteering to work in a soup kitchen or two. Hopefully, I can find some India-based bloggers to keep me company.

My Nephew, who has recently entered the IT profession and is busy programming for a cool site that is in stealth mode may also be travelling with me. He has an interest in meeting single Indian women and hopes to find women who look like Rani Mukherjee, Isha Koppikar, Shamitha Shetty, Riya Sen or Priyanka Chopra. I think he will be out of luck, but will let others provide the opportunity to correct me. An Indian friend of mines once said that if you want to find beautiful Indian women, Bangalore and Chennai are the last places in India you want to go.

Do you love IT conversations? Show It
I wonder if Phil Windley knows that I am a big fan of IT Conversations. Having worked all day last Saturday and Sunday being alone at work on the floor, I put Anne Thomas Manes, Stephen O'Grady, Gary McGraw and others on blast while I attempted to write code. I realize that even I am dangerous nowadays when attempting to build working software

Patriotism, India and Charity
Hopefully our friends in India outsourcing firms can consider supporting this worthy cause.

Good policy makes good security
Jackson Shaw comments on how Active Directory is becoming the center of the universe within many enterprises. I wonder though if the Quest ActiveRoles product should be something that Microsoft should purchase and simply put into the next version?

Logging out from Cardspace
I hate when folks complain about technology when they haven't researched deeply enough the underlying issues why what they are asking for is problematic?

John Newton and Bex Huff are two of the smartest in the world of ECM. I figured I would ask them questions in hopes of them responding...

Historically, Documentum and some of the other vendors in the ECM space as part of the design of their product made folks duplicate user stores. Brian Huff has chimed in stating that ECM products should focus on content and not users which is something most folks will agree with. What makes it so hard to move away from the legacy approach? Is it really that embedded?

If you hang out with the portal crowd, you have folks discussing common industry standards such as portlets. If you hang out in the rules engine crowd, you have standards such as rulesML and so on. If you look at pretty much any and every technology horizontal, you can find not only evidence of standards but vendors being passionate about working together to create more. Why is ECM the sole domain that doesn't have this mindset?

What do folks actually talk about at AIIM conferences? How come there is never any discussion regarding interoperability? I know that if you go to a Burton Group conference they will talk about interoperability for federated identity, entitlements management, portals, BPM and other technologies. If folks in the ECM world aren't talking about interoperability, are they simply encouraging their attendees to wander mindlessly ogling the latest products in a stovepipe manner?

The whole SOAP vs REST debate seems intriguing to me. Many in the world of ECM think that REST is a natural fit which I would agree if they think about ECM in an insular way. What does it take to get ECM vendors to NOT think about searching for a document, retrieving a document and so on and instead thinking about how ECM plays i a larger process such as I want to retrieve all documents for a claim? I suspect the conversation may migrate more towards SOAP if they had the right mindset. Curious to also understand why it has to be either/or and not both? Yes, I expect part of the issue is time but what else is an impediment?

You probably have heard of design patterns, Core J2EE patterns, SOA patterns, .NET patterns and so on. When will folks start talking about ECM patterns?

I suspect that if your enterprise isn't filled with process weenies who substitute process for competence then the odds are good that you have real genuine leadership that understands that innovation is about structured creativity. So, then what is creativity? Creativity is 1% invention and 99% stealing. Innovators recognize the good things in other contexts, in proven practice and have the ability to see things in patterns.

Two of the best innovators I know is James Tarbell and James Governor. Notice a pattern...

In a culture of outsourcing work to suboptimal countries such as India, American developers need to do a better job of helping their managers become leaders...



Many developers bitch and complain that their managers don't understand what the team is doing, don't provide the necessary resources, and have unrealistic demands or expectations. Here is yet another scenario where perception over reality thinking should be shot. Most managers are neither stupid nor malicious and are honestly trying to do their jobs well. You can help your manager to be more effective by following a few simple rules. Making your manager effective and happy is an excellent way to advance your career. Following these rules makes the manager and team more effective, which is good for everybody.

Here are some things to noodle:

Managers are required to be offensive: There is a distinction between being offensive and being insulting. One thing that offends many is when managers ask tough questions. It's their job to do this so don't get it twisted and take it personal. Most managers don't enjoy humiliating folks and aren't looking for an excuse to fire you. Reality says that they would rather see you successful than to spend all their remaining free time writing tons of documentation for human resources to can you.

Managers have lots of issues that developers don't nor have visibility into. This should translate into a simple understanding that their priorities may seem twisted but in reality they may be more aligned than you think. Folks need to get better at assuming good faith and not think everything is about throwing daggers

A manager's job is to allocate resources, to track progress, and to manage risk. You can help the manager do that job by presenting information in that context.

Present multiple alternatives. Don't just tell managers that there are problems, and wait for them to tell you how to fix them. That's not a manager's job.

If you think your managers are making unreasonable requests, then talk to them about it. They often do not realize they are being unreasonable. Managers want to know the truth, and most managers are very willing to change their minds. Good managers want people to correct them. Some managers like to Push people until they push back

It's better to be credible than to be agreeable. Managers will defer to your judgment if they believe that you know what you are talking about. If you get too defensive, or if you are too willing to agree with them, they will lose confidence in your abilities.

The pointy haired boss at the end of a day is a human. Managers make mistakes. Managers get tired. Managers sometimes collapse under pressure. Managers sometimes get irritable or angry without good reason. Managers sometimes get distracted by personal problems. Don't hold managers to an incredibly high standard just because they make more money, have an impressive title, or have the authority to fire you. They are just people, trying to do their jobs the best they can, learning by trial-and-error, hoping to make their house payments and raise their kids and have a little fun once in a while.

Secure coding - Getting Buy-In
Gunnar Peterson shares his advice on secure coding within an enterprise context that for the most part I agree with. Of course, he should ask the question whether secure coding should be championed by the security team or is it better positioned by being championed by Enterprise Architects? Likewise, he skipped over an important success factor in terms of security at large and that is the acknowledgement that the vast majority of folks in large enterprises who have security responsibility don't know how to program.

Enterprise Architecture and the Invasion of the Project Snatchers
It is good that Satyam's Chief Mr. Raju acknowledges that they should use Americans for higher value American projects and others will agree with this as sound business judgement. However, one of the topics not discussed is why would an American want to work for an Indian outsourcing firm especially if they are at the top of their game. Indian outsourcing firms have the stigma of not paying as well as their American counterparts and therefore won't gain access to the same quality of talent. Every American I know that has worked for an Indian outsourcing firm is severely underpaid.

Thinking SOA...
David Linthicum shares some great thinking on thinking about SOA. Most folks tend to get it twisted.

MySQL 5.1
Too bad the MySQL community is still busy misleading folks by convincing them that their product is open source when you can't find 100% of the code base for the current release. I guess you can twist words or they can move to a model such as Liferay which is 100% open source for life.

Linux is NOT ready for the laptop
Linux is also not ready for the Enterprise desktop either

GlassFish V2 ships
I wonder which analyst firm won't be willing to show GlassFish in the Leaders Quadrant?

On the cover of today's Wall Street Journal, there is a great article on how India discriminates against Christianity...



Almost all Christians in India hail from the so-called Dalit community, the former "untouchables" relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. The government however didn't require outsourcing firms to step up and do their part to right this historical wrong.

Any Dalit caught abandoning Hinduism for Christianity loses these priveleges and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on comings and goings.

India's Dalits have tried over the centuries to escape their low status, which Hindu scriptures teach is a punishment for sins in a previous life, by embracing caste-less religions. Dalits are now turning to Christianity, attracted by benefits such as education and health care that are sometimes offered by Western funded congregations.

While discrimination against Dalits is illegal, it is in practice widespread where people from higher castes often won't touch a Dalit or share food or water. Many people of higher castes object to any action such as quotas which seek to right past wrongs and prefer to talk as if they are the victims of systemic discrimination while others who are employed by outsourcing firms will simply pretend that this problem doesn't exist and exercise their right to remain silent on this matter.

My take is that India is one of the most diverse countries on the planet only if you choose to change the meaning of diversity. If you see diversity through the lens of caste, gender, ethnic origin or religion, you may see something other than diversity, but who am I to challenge a nation of Billions to stand for the poor...

A friend of mines (Hi Pratul) suggested that I would be better off making folks aware of lack of diversity by using kind words than challenging their lack of open thinking by throwing daggers. Like myself, he believes that charity may be the best gift one could give to others...



I guess he is encouraging me to put my money where my mouth is. One of the most honorable things one can do is to die in the name of your country. Many young American men and women are dying in the pursuit of spreading freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this war against terror, we have lost thousands of lives.

I guess one small token of gratitude would be for me to personally donate to worthy charities that benefit fallen soldiers who died to protect our freedom to outsource jobs to other countries, to perform ungodly acts in public settings and to allow us to waste food at industry conferences while children in third world countries starve.

I would like to offer $200 for each and every soldier who was born in India and perished in Iraq and/or Afghanistan who served in the United States Armed Forces to either the charity of their families choice or to a worthy charity such as Freedom is not free which aids wounded service members and their families.

Please post their names, rank and branch of service so that I and others can honor them in a way that they deserve...

Being an employee or a consultant
I wonder if the brainwashing regarding total compensation packages is something that others are experiencing? Is competitive compensation the same as modest? The best quote is: You are rated based on the stupid rules invented by someone in the HR department. All year you are earning points for good behavior. The highest points are earned if you fill and submit your timesheets which I cannot refute.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning Report
Rajesh asks whether Sun Java System Identity Manager appearing in the magic quadrant is a surprise to anyone. My response is no as Sun pays lots of money for this to occur. I am still awaiting news that someone in the past has actually landed in the leaders quadrant without paying fees.

ISE issues EA Framework
I suspect lots of folks in the federal government are giddy that they got yet another framework to help them create comprehensive documentation that will sit on the shelf.

Insourcing and outsourcing: two sides to the same coin?
Here is a story of graceful degradation in how Infosys discusses how many of their customers bringing work back in-house. They have mentioned how they are also moving up the foodchain which I totally support without of course mentioning that as you move up, the need for lots of butts in seats goes down and the trend that revenues will grow while also weeding mediocrity is beneficial for both parties. There are hundreds of thousands of folks in IT in India today that shouldn't be.

The difference in being an enterprise architect and consultants providing enterprise architecture services
I would love for others to share their thoughts on this topic. I plan on responding sometime next week in a separate blog entry.

ECM and Secure Coding
Here is evidence that Nuxeo at least is noodling secure coding. I wonder if Alfresco and Stellent are as well?

Why software developers should aspire to become enterprise architects
I wonder what enterprise architects should aspire to become?

Magazine Oriented Architecture
Finally, a proposal on SOA that makes a lot of sense. I suspect though that Aloof hasn't acknowledged that introducing a definition that has more integrity wouldn't allow for propagation of magic quadrants and other forms of distillation that many IT executives love.

To be or not to be an identity provider?
Does anyone know why being hub-based is evil?

Entitlement Management
Many identity bloggers will exercise their right to remain silent on topics that make sense within an enterprise when they don't have a product that fulfill this important need.

Diversity or the black and white thingy
A Jewish guy in New York talks about racial diversity or the lack of (depending on one's perspective) in a bold way. Most folks would never talk of such topics within their blog. My personal opinion is that more conversations such as these need to occur in the blogosphere. He is spot on when it comes to Black and Indian folks. I wonder what his thoughts are regarding Asian and Hispanic. I wonder if he would agree that racism is propogated when folks are afraid to offend and where honest dialog cannot occur?

Free trade refers to a general openness to exchange goods and information between and among nations with few or no barriers to trade. Fair trade refers to exchanges, the terms of which meet the demands of justice...



Fair trade organizations, such as the Fair Trade Federation and the International Federation for Alternative Trade maintain that fair trade practices alleviate poverty, enhance gender equity, improve working conditions, the environment, and distributive justice.

By contrast, free trade proponents believe that under a system of voluntary exchange, the demands of justice are met. Although free traders hope to alleviate poverty and improve conditions around the world, they prefer measures that are less intrusive than fair traders, who regard the unfettered market as injurious to these same goals.

Free traders argue that in the long run markets will solve - that is, when permitted to come to equilibrium, both rich and poor nations will benefit. In this way, free traders hold that free trade is fair trade.

Continuing the dialog with George Alexander who is a software developer in India...

You're talking about a country where traditional stereotypes and emphasis on marital status factor in. The traditional stereotype of a woman is slowly changing though as western culture influences the Indian mindset and the urban Indian mindset more specifically.

George, I am going on the attack but not for the reason you may initially assume. I don't like India because they are adopting more of a Western mindset. Us men are immoral, power hungry inhumane savages who only care about making money and almost never take a pause to think about the human condition. Within India, women are the moral fiber which makes India a rich cultural treasure chest. Women are modest in their behavior and don't dress like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, the divorce rate is incredibly low whereas in America there are more folks who have been divorced than who stay married. Some aspects of Indias culture towards the treatment of women are horrific such as burning women to avoid dowry but other aspects are Godly across all religions practiced there. As you participate in a larger global ecosystem, I would love to see India bloggers encourage their fellow countrymen to remain open minded but not throw the baby out with the bath water.

let me cite Infosys which has a neat open source community (InfyLUG) tied up with FOSS. IN that focuses on training, creating solutions, RnD, product development and consulting using open source. And as for the second part of your question, this is done by volunteers... in their free time and also outside their project work. That's just an example I know and have heard of.

Can we agree that if folks are doing this on their free time that their employee isn't involved and therefore Infosys isn't participating in the larger community? Can we acknowledge that training, creating solutions and consulting says that they use open source but don't contribute to it? Can we acknowledge that if they are using open source in an RND way but this RND stays private that it is not open source?

Do Indian outsourcing firms provide a budget for software developers to acquire books on topics such as rules engines, ECM, SOA and security?Yeah, sure! One of the things I like about the Indian IT Industry is that they emphasis a whole lot on training.

My question wasn't about training as I know this occurs. My question was specifically about books. Awhile back, I blogged that a friend of mines who went to India mentioned that none of the folks he met had any recent books on their desks. He also mentioned that many of the books that were there were bootlegged copies that were printed on rice-like paper. The conversation came up in the context that we were both book authors and did notice that not only our respective statements from various publishers showed that book sales in China were order of magnitudes higher when compared to India but couldn't find any book author that have contradicting royalty statements. One take is that Indian outsourcing firms don't buy books for individuals and only their libraries. Another take is that they don't buy books at all and leave it to the individuals to acquire at the cheapest way. Another take still is that folks simply rely on google to find their information. I would hate to think that as a client if I outsourced production support activities that folks didn't have readily accessible information and had to rely on google for the answers.

find it disturbing that James encouraged readers to create additional stress on Indian call center workers by "psychologically disturbing" them.

I wonder if you have ever noted that I have encouraged this behavior for American businesses as well? Have you ever thought about the consumer perspective of outsourcing? The usual pattern is that when an American company outsources work to India, they tend to at many levels cripple the level of access afforded to them in the name of security. If you acknowledge that a pattern frequently found is that offshore folks don't have the same levels of access as onshore folks then you must equally acknowledge that the ability to serve the consumer in many circumstances may also be affected. While the tactic I suggest harms the innocent call center workers who are simply attempting to earn a living, it does have a trickle down effect to the bottom line of evil corporations that don't treat their customers as being important.

I bet you don't also know that harrassment and complaining can be a good thing in terms of customer service as well? If you voice your opinion loud enough, many companies will buy you off by sending you coupons, free merchandise and so on. In other situations, complaining also works to a consumers advantage. For example, if you have a Sprint cell phone and want to cancel service yet your two year contract isn't up, the best way to get out of it is to not pay for termination charges that can be as high as $175 but to start complaining. Sprint tracks the number of calls that each customer makes to their call center and determines which are the most expensive customers and fires them.

a strong critic of outsourcing… outsourcing to India and China more specifically (other locations are a-okay).

I am happy to note that George knows that I am not anti-outsourcing in general and in fact believe that it makes sense in some situations. I would be curious to know though if he has any thoughts as to why I may have certain beliefs. What do others think my perspective is on India? Maybe this is an opportunity for him to ask me questions?

I do thank George for helping me see things through his lens. Part of being diverse has nothing to do with what race, religion, ethnic origin or gender one is but the ability to be savage in the pursuit of understanding others. I still have one other question that I didn't ask that is related to charity. One observation I have is that folks in India IT outsourcing firms expect their employer to handle charity and eschew direct participation / conversation about this. I understand time constraints but is this the right mindset that employees should have? If not, what would it take to get India based bloggers to talk about charity within their own blogs and to help spread the wealth?

I will be in India speaking at a conference in February and would love to network with fellow Indian bloggers and look forward to having many face to face conversations. Hopefully, we can dig deeper into the meaning of from incite comes insight and not think of it as request/response but an ongoing dialog where one truly wants to understand another's culture.

George left several comments in my blog that I thought were worthy of further exploration...



I originally asked: Where can I find EEOC numbers indicating the number of Hispanic employees in the United States employed by Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys and TCS? and he responded with Where do you usually find EEOC numbers indicating the number of Hispanic employees in the United States employed by Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google? . I guess one could always respond with another question pointing out inequality in making certain numbers public but I think at some level this misses the point. If you were to walk the corridors of the firms you mentioned, it wouldn't take that long to bump into a truly diverse culture. I can also say that in my travels along with personal networks that I know these firms employ hundreds of folks of Hispanic origin. I have yet to meet face-to-face or virtually any hispanic employees of Wipro, TCS or Cognizant that work in India. If you know of a dozen or two, please do not hesitate to introduce them to me.


I also asked: Do any of the Indian outsourcing firms have any Dalits in the senior management ranks? where he responded: Frankly, Indian IT outsourcing companies do no care whether you are a dalit, a brahmin or a millionaire as long as you do the job expected. At a senior level, if you are capable of doing the job and they're happy with you, they take you in. One could interpret from a numbers perspective that zero point zero Dalits exist in senior management ranks. The folks who stand up and say that they aren't biased tend to be the places where diversity is lacking the most.

Another question was: Do any of the Indian outsourcing firms have any women in the senior management ranks? and he responded with Offcourse, consider Kiran Mazumdar Shaw: CEO of biocon. There are a few of ladies in my company too who are on top. If you've got what it takes, no one is going to stop you. If you don't have what it takes... you know the rest of the story. I have to admit, I never heard of BioCon but I suspect that they are no where near the size of Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and so on. If I were to read into your response, it feels as if your employer is diverse in that you have a few ladies on top but this is by no means representative of Indian outsourcing firms at large.

The most avoid question was: Do Indian outsourcing firms restrict their employees from contributing to open source on their free time? where George responded with Do they provide resources to participate? No they don't restrict. Sheash, off course not. Infact, they encourage in many ways. Our CIO had once asked our entire group to do something productive as a showcase project. The funny thing is that a showcase project doesn't feel like at any level open source? After all, open is exactly that. You didn't mention the project name nor did you mention if folks outside your firm even participated. Can we acknowledge at some level that open source requires a community and not just one company?

I wonder if George has any thoughts on which will be the first Indian outsourcing firm to establish a blogging platform that is publicly exposed for all of its employees. Kinda like Sun?

Figured I would share sage wisdom in terms of making a career move...



In case you haven't figured it out yet, the vast majority of enterprise architects work less hours than hardcore software developers with compatible pay. While I will disclaim that dinosaur mainframe folks tend to work the least amount of hours in IT, enterprise architects have similiar priveleges.

Consider the fact that even for us enterprise architects that do work a lot of hours, we still have certain luxuries as to how and when work will get done. For example, I have been thinking about what should be part of my 2008 agenda and I have been able to noodle this while driving a car, eating dinner, at the mall and so on. I bet software developers can't do their craft well while driving.

Software developers love to think of their code as a thing of beauty and always attempt to gain reuse yet it cannot match the reuse of Powerpoint and the frequent conversations many enterprise architects have. Consider the simple fact that I have been reusing the same Powerpoint presentation with only minor tweaks on the subject of SOA since 2002. I expect that based on current adoption rates, I still can get at least another five or six presentations out of it in the next couple of years.

When enterprise architects are busy aligning with the business, we have to remember to dumb down our vocabulary. Reality says that in many situations we can skip much of the homework required and just stay dumb by learning a few buzzwords, focusing on nomenclature and practicing hand waving techniques. If we are really smart, we will master the artful copying of quotes from industry analysts in our emails and presentations. If we are even smarter, we don't even have to understand reality and can instead stay focused on perception management. After all, the higher up in the clouds you go, perception is reality.

Imagine not having to bust your brain figuring out complex problems and simply being able to defer it to others whether it be poorly dressed slobs otherwise known as software developers or high-classed pimped out consultants who will gladly interview developer for opportunities and then nicely package it as their own. The best situation though is that enterprise architects get to listen rapty to the vendor sales pitch on their value proposition, strong ROI and how we are all partners without ever asking ourselves if ever vendor provides ROI, then how come IT is so damn expensive.

Reality says that enterprise architects can exercise their rights to remain silent when it comes to federated identity, open source or anything truly valuable and instead focus on drawing cartoons for the executive crowd while dreaming about the day when all the vendors stories will manifest in terms of ROI and they are the only employee left in IT and they can be king of the hill...

ECM and Records Management
Jesse Wilkins mentioned something that I have always had as a thought in the back of mind which he mentions that he doesn't program. I am curious how pervasive the lack of programming experience is in the world of ECM? Maybe this explains why WSDL is horrific and no one is complaining?

The social etiquette of blogging
Blog eitquette is hogwash. We need more incite so that insight can emerge...

SOA Confusion — Practitioners versus Pundits
I wonder why enterprise architects aren't listening to their industry peers and instead prefer abstract conversation on SOA from software vendors and consulting firms?

Leadership and corporate behavior
I like the thinking of Mike Kavis. While I know he has limited influence in terms of CIO magazine, we do need to encourage him to encourage CIO to publish more print articles on the bottom up perspective of leadership. To many IT executives are busy patting themselves on the back when they should be kicking themselves in the bleep.

Enterprise Architect, another new name for doing nothing?
I wonder if Chris Han understands that many enterprise architects spend all day miseducating non-technical IT executives on expensive closed source products. When they are not busy doing this, they may be crafting their next four color chock-a-block eye candy Powerpoint and practicing handwaving techniques. They are incredibly busy

Pat Patterson left a comment in my blog that is worthy of further analysis...



Here is the comment that Pat left:

ZFS for Linux - http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE My understanding (and I am not a lawyer, even on open source licensing!) is that CDDL/GPL incompatibilities prevent building ZFS into the Linux kernel. CDDL says "you can mingle this code with anything", GPL says "you can only mingle this code with GPL code"...
As for Windows, the ZFS code is there, I'm not sure that anyone except Microsoft could graft a new filesystem into Windows.

Pat is one of the most well-intentioned individuals and bloggers I know. The problem is that his perspective on CDDL is somewhat insular and indoctrinated. I wonder if he has ever had a conversation with any corporate lawyers whose primary business isn't technology and asked them their opinion of CDDL.

A lawyer friend of mines (Hi Tricia) who is employed by a Fortune 200 Bank had pinged me awhile back wanting to get my opinion on a variety of open source projects. In conversations with lawyers, I tend to learn a lot and was especially intrigued that her opinion was that using standalone software like operating systems has a different risk profile than using software such as libraries that are compiled in.

She mentioned that corporate friendly licenses permit redistribution without restrictions on commercial use and don't have broad retaliation clauses. In reading into her position, I would guess that she doesn't like Sun, IBM or Mozilla but would like likes such as GPL 2.0, Apache and MIT though. Maybe I lucked out in that projects such as Liferay Enterprise Portal, ServiceMix and others that I recommend fall into the later while the ones I constantly bash do not...

Many folks believe that folks in India don't understand etiquette when it comes to work hours. Should American's come into work at 6am so that folks in India don't have to stay late or should both parties equally inconvenience themselves...

Mike Kavis attempted to explain the benefits of social networking without first understanding its impediments within an enterprise context...



Social networking within the enterprise can't happen in any meaningful way until the enterprise truly understands what being social means. I remember a conversation with several architects who are employed by a large enterprise across the street from me where they found it intriguing that I actually had frequent conversations with VP-level IT executives in my company. One of them mentioned to me that they have never talked with their VP while another mentioned that they have talked with theirs only once in the last five years.

Within our shop, we have a more open culture where pretty much everyone talks with everyone else. The notion of what tier you are at, matters more to the HR system than it does to how we operate on a daily basis. While at some level, we believe in not allowing our immediate boss to be caught off-guard by exercising the right to no surprises, we also don't attempt to control the message in any hierarchical way.

Many folks here know that I am a big into the notion of community and not just in a virtual sense but also in terms of local communities as well. I currently have two high school kids from the inner city reporting to me. Several weeks ago, an SVP was strolling down the aisle and pulled up a chair and had a conversation with one of them. My student mentioned how he wanted to attend MIT and hinted that schools such as Rensallaer where good but not MIT. Of course, this executive attended RPI and was cool.

My Enterprise Architect peers in New York City in firms such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse put on their monkey suits every day and play corporate guy while our culture allows us to dress down and talk to each other like humans. Within our shop, it is not just about our SVP as this permeates the culture. Does your CEO and other folks on executive row eat in the same cafeteria you do? Ours does...

I wonder if Mike Kavis is guilty of stereotyping all large enterprises with the same level of formality bullshit without understanding that embracing social networking is not difficult if you have the right leadership. Social networking is difficult within an enterprise context if you have IT executives who practice management by magazine, who believe that process can be a substitute for competence, who speak in a humorless monotone where your call is important to us while I transfer you to Mr. Dialtone.

Culture is a manifestation of leadership where those who understand social networking tend to understand the distinction between power and authority. Maybe our friends in CIO magazine could stop feeding the egos of IT executives and start writing more about how to make enterprises better. While they are at it, explain to their readers the difference between management and leadership. Good leaders foster good culture; bad leaders foster bad culture and CIO magazine needs to help IT executives know when their behaviors are anti-social. What if Mike Kavis started blogging about what leadership behaviors result in a bad culture? Would this help others realize why social networking is more than just a technology play?

To be or not to be an identity provider?
One should never research the notion of the business model of identity providers from scratch when there are many already in existence. How about starting with Securities Hub to not only understand the business model of being an identity provider but why it matters in an industry vertical context which most identity bloggers pretend don't exist.

The ECM Blogosphere
Laurence is spot on in his thoughts on the lack of collaboration in the ECM domain. Laurence is primarily focused on Documentum and the only employee of this firm that blogs is Craig Randall who thinks that collaboration means press release and not conversation. I wonder if other EMC employees will step up and fill in this gap?

Outsourcing IT to unlikely places, like America
Imagine folks coming to their senses and thinking about outsourcing as being more than a strategy around rate arbitrage and instead focusing on high quality talent at reasonable prices.

ECM and Records Management
I am starting to like Jesse Wilkins. I actually know what Alchemy is. I have heard others talk about hijacking Xerox metacode and converting it so that it could be stored in an ECM platform. I wonder though why should someone use products such as Alchemy, Mobius and Hyland when they could shove it into Nuxeo, Documentum or Alfresco? I think the notion of data-level integration in this space is worthy of a separate conversation and hope that Billy Cripe, Bex Huff and Laurence Hart can help shape this answer better. I would think to get this right, it would require all of these vendors to make their data models more open and even provide specifications in terms of record formats, compression and encryption routines and so on? In terms of document-level deduplication, my thought was a little different. Let's say you are ATT and you have hundreds of millions of cell phone bills stored. Much of the text within each bill is common where only the the actual amount you need to pay along with customer specific information changes. If you are hijacking printstreams then you may have an opportunity to not store all that common stuff redundantly and save tons of disk space

Bush on Iraq: Satan’s Codpiece Speaks
We need to stand up and stop the bushitler...

Why open source communities continue to thrive (and what other communities can learn from it)
I am excited to see one industry analyst (Alex Fletcher) understand the importance of secure coding practices and its need within the open source community. I will donate $100 each to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund if Nick Malik, James Governor and Guy Kawasaki in their names, if they blog about this important topic within the next week.

Leading in the Technical Environment
Thanks for your support

Using SOA to align IT with itself
Jeff is onto something. We spend way too much time talking about aligning with the business without getting our IT house in order. His advice is worthy of forwarding via corporate email

Here is the litmus test to figure out what you really are...



You work very odd hours. It's difficult to maintain a relationship or a family. You are paid a lot of money to keep your client happy. You are paid well but your pimp gets most of the money. You spend a majority of your time in a hotel room.

You charge by the hour but your time can be extended for the right price. You are not proud of what you do. Creating fantasies for your clients is rewarded. You have no job satisfaction. If a client beats you up, the pimp just sends you to another client. People ask you, "What do you do?" and you can't explain it.

Your friends have distanced themselves from you and you're left hanging with only other "professionals." Your client pays for your hotel room plus your hourly rate. Your client always wants to know how much you charge and what they get for the money.

You know the pimp is charging more than you are worth but if the client is foolish enough to pay it's not your problem. When you leave to go see a client, you look great, but return looking like hell (compare your appearance on Monday AM to Friday PM).

You are rated on your "performance" in an excruciating ordeal. Even though you get paid the big bucks, it's the client who walks away smiling. The client always thinks your "cut" of your billing rate is higher than it actually is, and in turn, expects miracles from you.

When you deduct your "take" from your billing rate, you constantly wonder if you could get a better deal with another pimp. Everyday you wake up and tell yourself, "I'm not going to be doing this stuff the rest of my life.".

So, are you a consultant or a prostitute?

Enterprise Architects have lots of organizational visibility and therefore see lots of projects in trouble. Sometimes they are in trouble because of technical problems, but more often the problem is management...



Software developers, we feel your pain. We have watched some of our best and brightest lose their jobs to lesser individuals in far away lands such as India. We had the opportunity to stand for something, to save your job, to find alternatives to reduce costs, to be patriotic but instead we chose to exercise our right to remain silent while your job got outsourced and we savagely stayed focused on the development of our next chock-a-block eye candy Powerpoint.

I must admit, enterprise architects have lots of power and even more influence much of it we inappropriately use and even more of it we waste. Yet, there is limits to even our ability. We architects love to fix things but not for the reasons you think. No, its not because we believe in stealing all the glory but because we periodically need to have the feeling of satisfaction by delivering something periodically of value.

Enterprise architects love to fix things. However, when the problem is bad management and the management can't yet see the need for change, we generally can't fix that. When this happens, many of us hurt. Those amongst us that don't hurt are enterprise architects in title only, as focusing on the human aspects is core to our discipline, our persona and our soul.

Developers who produce shoddy work on slippy deadlines start thinking that it's their fault. Many of us have been there and nothing torques us more than to see someone doubt themself, when the fault lies elsewhere. We wish that we could sometimes tell folks that they shouldn't step in the leadership but we to must maintain our guard.

The only advice any enterprise architect can give is the following, but don't treat it as sage wisdom but more of a conversation (somewhat of a memento):

You can always act right, even if you are being told to act wrong. You can always test your code, refactor, and work closely with other engineers. You might get yelled at for it, but fcuk, you're going to get ripped a new one at anyway. The worst they could do is fire you, but you can always insist that they explain their reasoning up the management chain. If everyone quit, they'd fire the manager instead...

Jesse Wilkins commented on Informata: Rejoining the ECM conversation specifically mentioning his interest in records management.



Not being indoctrinated into the world of ECM, I had zero clue as to what records management meant but committed to figure it out. The funny thing is that I was ranting about something I actually have ran across in my travels. I am familar with the acronym known as IDARS stands for Integrated Document Archive and Retrieval Systems which I am of the belief is part of records management. If so, let the conversation begin.

• Should all platforms in the ECM domain have built-in support for imaging?
• How should web sites that want to retrieve documents for display interact with IDARS?
• Should ECM platforms such as Documentum, Alfresco, Nuxeo and others support the ability to hijack and convert printstreams without requiring a separate product purchase?
• It would seem that IDARS would be closely tied to ERP and CRM systems. How should ECM platforms integrate with them?
• Since the content stored within is static, is this an opportunity for ECM vendors to provide additional functionality where they de-duplicate from a disk space consumption perspective common text across documents which frequently occur in various statements?

I would love to know the answers to the following questions:

• Where can I find EEOC numbers indicating the number of Hispanic employees in the United States employed by Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys and TCS?
• What are the Tamil movie equivalents to 1942 Love Story, Biwi #1, Lagaan and Major Saab?
• Do any of the Indian outsourcing firms have any Dalits in the senior management ranks?
• Do any of the Indian outsourcing firms have any women in the senior management ranks?
• Do Indian outsourcing firms restrict their employees from contributing to open source on their free time? Do they provide resources to participate?
• Generally speaking, which outsourcing firms in India pay the best and which one pays the worst?
• Do Indian outsourcing firms provide a budget for software developers to acquire books on topics such as rules engines, ECM, SOA and security?
• Which Indian outsourcing firm provides training on writing secure code for all of their software developers?
• Are there phrases that are frequently used by Americans that folks in India find offensive?

I wonder if Laurence Hart read today's cover of the Wall Street Journal?



The article suggested that one of its perks was that employees frequent strip clubs. I suspect this is one way to remove high quality individuals from the talent pool. Maybe this explains why WSDL is so horrific in the world of ECM?

I would like to ask a favor of folks who read this blog. I recently received several comments in my blog regarding inappropriate advertising. At the top of each blog entry is a banner ad from google. Please click on respective links and leave a comment if anything inappropriate shows up...

Last week, several vendors asked me the same question of when should software vendors sell directly to the business and skip IT? I figured I would share my thoughts on this topic publicly...



The one movement within IT is the adoption of enterprise architecture and service orientation. Folks are busy at work planning out their strategies, understanding the value of business architecture and mapping out the notion of reusable service catalogs. Likewise, they are also embracing the notion of rationalization whereby they are attempting to eliminate functional, data, platform redundancies.

If we understand not only that words mean things but that perspectives are different then another problem space emerges. One of the thinly veiled chock-a-block eye candy Powerpoint that on one level makes it seem as if the vendors value proposition is in full alignment can actually from the perspective of the enterprise architect appear as a trojan horse.

Consider within the marketplace that there are a variety of products that claim to interoperate within an enterprise SOA but yet few of them talk about how they help enable creating SOAs that feel anything like business architects would expect them to and in essence are merely wrappers upon existing systems that may or may not expose the right levels of granularity.

For IT to have a sustainable SOA that goes above and beyond integration, they have to be more thoughtful in terms of what truly comprises a service. Enterprises understand that sometimes it is better to wholesale rewrite things to the right level of granularity than to reuse something simply because it exists.

Part of the sales pitch is incrementalism which feels good to business customers because they can get things faster while on another level feels fugly to enterprise architects because they know that incrementalism got them to the state of disillusionment amongst the IT portfolio. Enterprise Architects understand that IT is way too expensive and it got to be that way not in one big bang but one step at a time.

I would recommend to vendors who practice these patterns to also consider pursuit of enterprises who may have enterprise architects but don't really know what to do with them. If the corridors of the enterprise is filled with IT executives who came up through the technical ranks then I would cross them off my list as they would quickly spot deficiencies in the story a lot quicker than those in enterprises whose IT executives who haven't written a single line of code in their entire lifetime.

Pay careful attention to where the enterprise architects are on the foodchain for an organization. If they are reporting to a manager-level then by all means, bypass them. If they are reporting to a VP-level position then cross them off your list.

I would also recommend to vendors to use several of the social networking tools such as LinkedIn to figure out how well connected the folks you are dealing with are to other enterprises. If they appear insular in their thinking, then they are ripe for exploitation. However, if they have lots of contacts then they may actually use some of them to better understand how your value proposition truly worked in other customers.

While I am not sure that I may have fully answered the question asked of me, I do hope that I have pointed a few vendors in the right direction...

Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Domain Rename Tools
Would be interested in networking with individuals who have used this tool in a production environment within a large enterprise

Keep Your Job From Being 'Bangalored'
I am curious when Bangaloring will occur in the world of industry analysts?

When Free is the right strategy for analysts
Does anyone know if Nick Gall of Gartner has ever discussed this concept with his employer?

Ease of Participation as a success indicator
Industry analyst Alex Fletcher discusses the need for ease of participation in the world of open source and uses Alfresco as an example. It was my early thought to contribute to Alfresco in two forms. First, Alfresco currently doesn't practice any form of Secure Coding and therefore a cleanup of the code base is important. Secondarily, I wanted to add support for the ability to externalize authorization and provide a choice other than the fugly ACL model so indoctrinated in the world of ECM so that it would be more interoperable with BPM, ERP and CRM products. There is one flaw that Alex didn't mention and that is in order to participate the code base has to be 100% available and Alfresco simply doesn't meet this minimal standard.

Rejoining the ECM conversation
I am glad to see that Jesse Wilkins is game to have a conversation around standards in the world of ECM. One of the topics he proposes is on records management. As I have disclaimed, my day job tends to be more focused on security, SOA and software development where I don't have any interaction with what happens in the world of ECM except where they diverge from security, SOA and software development. Since, he talks about records management, I will make it a personal interest of mines to first figure out all the definitions for what records management means, form some thoughts in terms of what my employer is doing in this space, network with my peers in other enterprises and hopefully share my thoughts in hopes of not only a deeper dialog can emerge but also that some requirements for Stellent, Documentum, Filenet, Alfresco, Nuxeo and others will emerge. Conversations are nice, but it is nicer to see things implemented. I do hope that Billy Cripe, John Newton, Bex Huff and others in the meantime will participate since they are closer.

Back in the High Life
It is a wonderful thing to see Todd Biske back in the corporate world. I know that MomentumSI is a wonderful firm but in all reality, there is a subtle difference in providing enterprise architecture services than in being an Enterprise Architect. I hope his new employer is one that allows for open communication amongst their employees and that he has a boss that is not only a strong technical leader but also patriotic.

Making your blog China Proof
Are you curious to know if your blog is censored in China?

As an outsider looking in, Sri Lanka has a better value proposition over outsourcing to India...



Folks in Sri Lanka contribute more than their fair share to open source when compared against India. Even google finds Sri Lanka open source of high quality.

In terms of capability to truly do high-end projects without learning on the client's nickel, I encourage folks to check out this outsourcing firm...

Been busy preparing for my presentation at the Tulsa Tech Fest when I figure out that it is difficult to actually get their on a plane...



I find it intriguing that Tulsa International Airport doesn't have direct flights from JFK, Laguardia, Newark, Logan or even Bradley. I wonder why folks in Tulsa haven't stood up in protest and demanded that Delta, American and Southwest Airlines add more direct flights from major metros?

Mike Kavis of CIO magazine wrote an interesting blog on The Innovation Escape Hatch that is worthy of exploration...



I figured this would be a good opportunity to share some of my perspectives:

Tom talks to many people in corporate America every day. He explains to me that some of the people he talks two seem to have two different personalities. One being their true inner self, capable of displaying emotional intelligence, cognitive reasoning, and are innovative and generally curious. But then they transform into their corporate personality where they assimilate, follow orders, and don't rock the boat.

At some level one's persona should change. The way I interact with my significant other, my friends and family are most certainly different than how I interact with my co-workers and folks I meet within a work-context and they should be. I don't know that it is not about rocking the boat as much as much of the conversation changes due to social correctness. If you consider for a moment, most of us Americans work in diverse cultures but outside of work we don't experience this same form of diversity amongst friends and family.

Consider the simple truth that within my own family, I have family members that are Catholic, Baptist, Jehovah's Witness, Hindu, Muslim and Judiasm. Since they are my family members I can say lots of things about animal worship, how there is one God and only one God, there is no such thing as the Trinity or anything that comes to mind and family members will think of it as my eccentric personality and ignore it. However if I did the same thing in a work-context, it is guaranteed that I will be spending my morning in human resources.

Of course there is another perspective to rocking the boat which is a form of human risk adversion. Except in Wall Street firms where risk is rewarded at annual bonus time, most corporations over time have proven that you are better compensated by not sticking your neck out. It is better to duckdown and not be associated with any failure while attempting to heist your leg and add your unique smell to anything that feels successful.

James has very strong opinions both technically and politically. He has created a platform for himself where he can express his opinions with no constraints and without being bound by the walls of a corporation. He can do this because he keeps his company's identity hidden and does not represent the views of his employer. I am pretty sure James speaks in an entirely different tone at work.

The funny thing is that I actually do have constraints on what I say and don't within my blog. Many of my blog entries do offend but I do draw the line at being insulting.

In terms of the perspective that I keep my employer's identity hidden, it is not for the reasons one would assume. Reality says that it is pretty easy for someone to figure out whom my employer is. One of the reasons that I don't tend to mention my employer is that readers of blogs will read into what I am saying and think that I am somehow providing a public status of all of the things that are going on in IT when in fact it could be something that I am simply noodling or could have been a conversation I had with an employee of another enterprise. We live in a small world where conversations that are started in the blogosphere manage to make their way into work discussions and I simply don't want folks who read what I write to get things twisted.

As far as me speaking in an entirely different tone at work, I think that this perspective is most certainly wrong. Consider the fact that I have mentioned that at work, I do have a security orientation. Folks simply expect and tolerate security oriented folks to have more of a confrontational perspective than other roles. Of course, security folks have their line as well but it is a lot different than say a business architect. With a security agenda, sometimes it is a sell and sometimes it is a tell where as folks who do SOA don't have the same ability to tell.

For me, to discuss many of the things at work that I write about, I would have to devote a substantial amount of additional time crafting "politically acceptable" messages to cater to an audience that has certain expectations and guidelines.

I think you are accurate at some level but are missing another perspective. In the blogosphere, since you don't really have a clue as to whom is reading your blog, you can adopt a mindset that you are writing for yourself and not really care at an individual level about thoughts and truly focus on the notion of community...

Bank of Baroda to open branch in Trinidad and Tobago
Bank of Baroda is the fifth largest bank in India and is planning on opening shop in four countries including Trinidad and Tobago.

O'Reilly Calls for Participation
I am disappointed in Phil Windley for posting something so thinly veiled. Tim O'Reilly doesn't actually care if you participate but he does care if you send him a check

ZFS Rules
The folks over at Sun have created a wonderful file system for Solaris. I am curious though if they believe that file systems should be understand by all operating systems and what they think their next action item is in this regard. For example, Linux can mount an NTFS partition while Solaris can understand the FAT file system and so on. Should Sun be working on ports of ZFS to Windows and Linux?

Why is Enterprise Architecture becoming the next big thing?
Anything that enables the strategic intent of the business through technology will of course become big. The only thing that will cause EA to fall off the cliff is the lack of strong technical leadership, substituting process for competence, outsourcing important research to industry analyst firms you should be doing yourself, stupidity of IT executives who may get the idea to outsource strategy and falling for the thinly veiled sales pitches of software vendors who tell you about their wonderful architectures but really should be telling you something else?

Agile Career: SOA Senior Mentor
It is a good thing to post good job opportunities in the blogosphere especially ones that have the potential to advance the SOA agenda. Personally, I love the idea of public speaking but hate the idea of doing training. Speaking in audiences periodically is fulfilling while having to do so every day would feel a lot like work

Only in Fantasy worlds do folks always agree...



The world of ECM is unlike any other domain that one may run across. It is plagued by a plethora of disconnected products that don't integrate well, no notion of patterns or detailed reference architectures or even a consistent definition for what the ECM even contains. There are no standards specific to ECM, none of the vendors collaborate and yet everyone seems comfortable with this fact.

In a domain where one thinks about content and collaboration all day, one would conclude that participation in the blogosphere would come natural yet this aspect is also missing as only a handful of folks in the world of ECM have even noodled blogging. Periodically, you can find bloggers such as Jesse Wilkins, Brian Huff, Laurence Hart, Apoorv Durga, Sumanth Molakala, John Newton, Cornelia Davis and Alan Pelz-Sharpe sharing their insights but otherwise blogging on thoughts that are disconnected from other bloggers. It has been a curiosity of mines to figure out how they can move from simply using their blogs to write articles to having a conversation with each other that we can all observe.

Of course, this first requires a topic that all folks have some passion around exploring. Whether it is lack of ECM standards, how to integrate ECM products into Enterprise Security architectures or even how ECM should participate in a service oriented architecture (SOA) while avoiding the propagation of horrific WSDL.

Whatever the topic the community lands on, the best thing we can do to help each other is to have honest, open dialogs that others can observe...

America’s family farmers and ranchers should not have to compete with cheap, lower quality imports from countries that pay little or no attention to environmental and labor standards, and who manipulate currency levels at will to benefit trading arrangements...

We don't need free trade, we need fair trade...



Millions of people living in poverty depend on affordable medicines made in India. When Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis launched a legal battle to challenge India’s right to produce cheap, generic versions of medicines, half a million people voiced their opposition. And it has worked! Now, imagine if employees of Indian outsourcing firms stood for their own people and displayed just an ounce of patriotism.

So, before we go too far off-topic, let's understand the difference between free trade and fair trade. Free Trade means that China and others pay substantially less in taxes to do business in the U.S. than American companies. It means they are free to use the strength of the dollar to close our manufacturing facilities and put millions of workers out of work. It means they are free to ignore patent and trademark laws and protections. Free trade means that China and others are free to ignore the environment and dump toxins into the water and air which soon will affect our air and weather and eventually our coasts.Free trade also means foreign competitors are free to disregard trade agreements by closing their countries to U.S. products.

"Fair trade", on the other hand, would equalize the tax burdens of our domestic producers and competing imports. It would price the dollar at its fair trade value. It would enforce trademark, patent, and environmental laws and enforce trade agreements.

Fair trade would reward those companies that innovate, cut costs and invest in productivity. Fair Trade would achieve all the goals that Free Trade advocates espouse yet do so in a manner of integrity and with transparency.

As Fair Trade continues to be repressed and Free But Not Fair Trade is allowed to decimate our manufacturing, our wages will begin to equalize with the rest of the world by descending to the world’s standard of living. This will affect every American, no matter if their job is in manufacturing, service or government.

The answer for not only America, but India, China, Brazil, Philippines and the Caribbean is to eschew free trade and champion fair trade...

Disclaimer: I currently hold Novartis in my investment portfolio and have probably lost money due to them losing their court decision. I am happy to be a loser if humans in India can live...

In my Links for Labor Day 2007 I posted my observations of Documentum and Nuxeo. Eric Barroca chose to respond while Craig Randall exercised his right to remain silent...



For the record, every single vendor in the world of ECM either produces horrific WSDL or gets it twisted by focusing on REST with the notion that the world is all about them and that they shouldn't acknowledge that ECM is a participant in a larger context.

Anyway, I figured I would share Eric's most thoughtful posting:

This WSDL is a WSDL automatically generated by JBoss's WS stack (Axis in this case) from some classes. And it has been copied into the SVN to ease the development of a .NET client. We are well aware of the fact that it's horrible since we had to use it. But we can take the blame and we are well aware about this issues when WSDL are auto-generated by the WS stack. We are even currently working on this issue to improve the service platform (you can see some thought about the service approach here: Nuxeo EP: the Service Oriented ECM Platform).

It takes a person with real class to acknowledge not only their strengths but their weaknesses in a public forum. Generally speaking, customers really desire to hear that you acknowledge your faults and that you are passionate about fixing them. Nothing should be personal except what you choose to make personal.

We have already done some work on at "service" level by enabling a fully extensible architecture and a nice service-oriented / component-oriented API for use from Java (thanks to the OSGi-based NXRuntime's infrastructure). We also have worked on an extensible REST framework, based on RESTlet, for the platform which allows any component to easily contribute REST interfaces.

An understanding that an ECM platform shouldn't take sides on the SOAP vs REST debate but should support both is exactly the right answer. I wonder if the folks over at Stellent, Alfresco and Filenet agree?

And now, we are going to start on offering a clean and lean SOAP infrastructure. We have already the base framework where any component can declare some Web Services contributed to a central WS entry point (to share authentication, for example, or common parameters). We now need to find a way to have a nice generated WSDL from the WS stack. You can see the base WS infrastructure in the nuxeo-platform-ws component, with already some contributions to it (see, for instance, the Audit component or the Intuition component — which is a webservice offered to the Sinequa Intuition search engine). So... we are working on it and are currently starting our effort evaluating the wonderful world of Java WS stacks.

I really appreciate a discussion not just around product features but honest conversations around how products are built. The underlying design of a platform is important in that ECM folks may need to extend core functionality to help integrate with BPM, ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications. Clean APIs and Web Services help enable this so getting the interfaces right is important.

It is good to see that they aren't noodling thinly-veiled wrappers over existing APIs but evaluating what is the best way in terms of current customer usage while not comprimising the principles of what it means to build thoughtful SOAs.

Now the only thing outstanding is for me and Eric to figure out how to work together to increase the security of the Nuxeo platform. I am firm in my belief that I should put my money where my mouth is and spend time helping them embrace Secure Coding practices as the first step. At a later date, I will also help them incorporate XACML and replace legacy ACL approaches.

The wonderful thing is that contribution is easy with Nuxeo in that the entire code-base is available. I originally noodled doing something similar with Alfresco but their platform is not truly open unless you use the distorted definition embraced by many analyst firms.

I look forward to a continuing dialog and contributing over the winter holidays...

Does IT Hate Itself?
Why do us IT folks continue to systematically devalue personal contribution and self-worth? Why do we listen raptly to vendor sermons and empty our wallets into their collection plates?

Call for more EA collaboration
There are several topics that I would love to hear other enterprise architects share their opinion about including but not limited to: the value proposition of ECM, which industry analyst firms they respect and why, reasons why we still procure insecure software and what does it take for us to get our enterprises to participate in the open source community

Agile 2007 Conference
Ever notice that pretty much every speaker at an agile conference is either employed by a consulting firm or software vendor? Do you think that this may be an opportunity for thinly veiled sales pitches to emerge?

You have to be monitored
Bet you don't know what George Bush and John Edwards have in common?

Figured I would share several unconfirmed rumors regarding BEA's future direction...



Remember when folks such as Adam Bosworth worked for BEA? They were really strong into the notion of community when he was around. They sponsored lots of local user groups and make a big push to create not only open standards as part of the Java Community Process but also contributed much of their intellectual capital as well. Sadly, BEA has been without a keeper of the flame when it comes to community orientation.

Now that they have returned to profitability, you will hear announcements over the next couple of weeks how they will be borrowing a couple of pages from the Sun playbook in terms of turning their company towards an open source model. They have come to realize that being 100% closed source in the long run doesn't stimulate the type of innovation required to be viable in today's marketplace.

Rumors have it that the next version of BEA Weblogic Server will become 100% open source and freely available (in terms of cost). Many enterprises nowadays get J2EE containers for free through BEA competitors such as IBM and Oracle as part of larger enterprise deals. Likewise usage of GlassFish, Tomcat, Jetty, Resin and others that have always been free threaten the low-end. This only makes sense.

Rumor also has it that they are working on a lightweight J2EE-based content management platform. On one level, they are jumping into a crowded market while on another this marketplace needs something that is reasonably priced, enterprise scale and has the right underlying architecture. If anyone were to figure out how to get an ECM platform to participate in an SOA right, it most certainly would be BEA...

So, how does your enterprise define the word team...



Are you currently outsourcing? Do you define team as a bunch of individuals whom have never even met or even heard each others voices? Are you implementing best practices by embracing CMMi and other process-oriented approaches while not focusing on the human aspects of technology?

Are the hallways filled with complaints of a bureaucratic process? Are inter-team communication breaking down? Are teams are structured by specialty or phase deliverables? Do folks pass work to each other by written, required deliverables instead of visiting each other? Does lack of respect of one team for another occur as a subtle undertone? Is there over-generalization where each person is assigned to do everything, resulting in waste from changing mental gears?

I haven't spoken at an industry conference all year and am overdue to share enterprise perspectives with others. The funny thing is that I place way too many constraints on myself in terms of what events I will speak at.



For example, I absolutely refuse to present at either a Gartner or Forrester conference as they tend to be way too high level and I like to share more details. Likewise, I tend to avoid any of the O'Reilly conferences as they are jam-packed with lots of big names who happen to present well-polished but otherwise thinly-veiled sales pitches for the products they represent. I also tend to avoid conferences held in locations on the left coast because I have encountered way too much turbulence in the past and tend to freak out in a way that is not tolerable post 911.

The funny thing is that I have only spoken once outside of the United States and would love the opportunity to speak in India, Brazil or in the Middle East. Anyway, I will be at the Technology Managers Forum on October 18th in New York City followed up by the Tulsa Tech Fest the following day. If you will be in attendance, drop me a note so we can hook up...

Where does ECM go from here?
Noted industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe describes the relationship between ECM and storage. One can envision that an ECM platform would consume lots of storage. Likewise, one could also envision wanting to use it in the most efficient way possible to keep costs down. This would lead to asking the question of better practices around compression and de-duplication in the ECM domain. While building compression into an ECM platform is relatively straightforward where we leverage some deviant of the LZW algorithm, de-duplication not only across documents when they hash the same (file system level) but within the document chunks across documents should be part of the next conversation ECM folks should have. I am of the belief that the folks over at Stellent may already be working on this gaining a fast lead over Documentum, Alfresco, Nuxeo and Filenet in this regard.

SOA: How long will we talk about it?
My very first industry presentation on SOA was in 2002 and I am still getting requests to speak on this same topic in 2007. The funny thing is that I haven't needed to update my Powerpoint as folks still aren't ready for more advanced concepts

Does your application support ADAM
Jackson Shaw provided insight into how ADAM is being used within enterprise settings. As I understand you will not hear BMC, Sun, CA or Oracle specifically say that their identity management tools support ADAM and they will use an abstract term such as we support anything that is LDAP v3 compliant. Of course they can't tell you why ADAM isn't

How to make a PowerPoint chart
If there were ever one skill that Enterprise Architects needed to master it would be the creation of better PowerPoint. Many of us are horrific in terms of presentation to the point that Indian outsourcing firms can match our abilities. Have you ever seen PowerPoint done by folks at Accenture and McKinsey? They know what they are doing...

Roles - What 'bout it?
Shekhar Jha comments on the emerging extension to the otherwise boring conversation of identity management. I wonder if Jeff Bohren or Mark Dixon have any thoughts on NIST?

I am of the belief that many VC firms are making suboptimal investments in software companies and figured I would enlighten them to an emerging perspective of buyers on enterprise software...



Not a single day goes by where multiple software vendors blow up my phone attempting to sell their value proposition. The funny thing is that many of them haven't figured out why they aren't penetrating the interest threshold. Part of the problem is that just because someone finds a gap in their architecture, doesn't mean that it needs to be filled.

Consider the simple fact that any large enterprise has hundreds if not thousands of gaps within their architecture combined with another simple fact that one needs to prioritize their spending to focus on the biggest bang says that the vast majority of value propositions will go ignored.

VC firms could do themselves a big favor by encouraging industry analysts leverage their influence for the mutual benefit of all parties by focusing on spending priorities vs narrow-grained categorization. For example, it is easy to find a comparison of identity management vendors where the likes of Mark Dixon, Pat Patterson, Jeff Bohren, Nishant Kaushik and others will debate the merits of their products but there is no guidance when it comes to whether one should go down the path of identity management or something else. Jackson Shaw, awhile back asked whether folks should focus on identity management or identity consolidation and absolutely no one chimed in. I would have placed bets that folks such as Bob Blakely, Gerry Gebel, Dan Blum, James Governor and Michael Cote would have chimed in but I would have lost money.

Likewise, Marco commented on the need for role mining but didn't provide any of his own thoughts in terms of whether he felt an enterprise should spend money on these classes of tools over identity management, entitlements management or for that matter any other security concern.

I guess everything is important, but what is more important? This is where bloggers will most certainly exercise their rights to remain silent. The funny thing though is that most VC firms have a great sense as to whether unique IP is created and whether it fills a viable gap but that really isn't the whole picture. I suspect that the vast majority of them really have zero clue as to how enterprise architects and other IT executives make decisions in terms of software acquisition.

If you were to look at software from the perspective of a large enterprise, you would see hundreds if not thousands of distinct software vendors and products as part of their portfolio. Each of them takes time to manage. Adding just one more thing may be the breaking point and therefore one of the things that becomes important as part of the decision making process is if one decides to consider a new product, we need to understand minimally what other products we have that it can displace with the ideal situation being displacement of multiple products.

If a vendor and their VC firm start to understand this dynamic then they may also figure out that the sales cycle becomes a lot quicker. Ask yourself, if you are selling to James McGovern and you have a unique value proposition with a strong ROI but requires James McGovern to do lots of internal evangelism versus another software vendor who may not have as strong ROI but displaces say five products the enterprise already uses then which will he pay attention to first?

The funny thing is that folks haven't figured out that if IT can displace software quickly then the procurement cycle is blazingly fast. However, if vendors are doing the same tired pitch of increased revenue, then the IT folks have to work with the business folk to quantify the opportunity which not only takes more time but results in the potential for the opportunity to disappear due to additional scrutiny...

Book Review: SOA
Laurence Hart gains an appreciation for SOA and ECM. I wonder if him and Bex Huff agree that string_1 in WSDL is unintuitive while looking at a prior presentation from Craig Randall that web services should be stateless and the notion of a sessionID is fugly?

Even Analysts Face Open Source Questions
Geva Perry has a wonderful perspective on Gartner in the believe that there is a fierce internal debate going on at Gartner about the question of blogging where the competent analyst argue for blogging; and the rest are against it. James Governor believes that it may be because they are simply too busy which is a curious statement because one could assume that Redmonk isn't as busy as Gartner which simply isn't true and therefore the real reason resides elsewhere...

Software Engineering
Here is the job description for a mission-critical enterprise application where absolutely zero years of experience is required to be a software engineer. I wonder what kind of voodoo they practice?

Why hard coding entitlements is bad
Here is a great blog entry that I would love for Bex Huff, Jeff Bohren and others should noodle within their own respective domains

IDM vendors not supporting Exchange 2007
Jackson Shaw comments on something that enterprise folks should pay attention to in the world of identity management. Maybe Mark Dixon and Nishant Kaushik could chime in and provide their own perspective? I wonder how many vendors support Microsoft ADAM and OpenLDAP?

EMC making some moves
I wonder if Laurence Hart understands that many software vendors steal the best talent from the consulting ranks especially if the consulting firm has horrific bench policies, doesn't pay top dollar or even provide opportunities for growth by allowing folks to attend conference and taking training courses. Anyway, the pattern you describe has been happening at other firms in the world of ECM and you may be well-served by networking with them and speaking as a unified voice than a lone voice in the blogosphere

Master Foo defines enterprise architecture
It is sad that many folks in the enterprise architecture domain behave in this manner.

When you combine the need for software development and rate arbitrage, you end up with a repeatable process of leveraging warm bodies...



Over time there have been a variety of anecdotal phrases that we know are back-testable and yet we choose to ignore them. You have probably heard the phrase that one out of twenty programmers produces twenty times the software compared to the average programmer.

Bruce Webster in 1996 also concluded that half of these programmers could be terminated without any software projects missing deadlines. It makes me curious why Americans who outsource, haven't yet put strategies in place around this notion. I have yet to run across any Fortune enterprise where one of the characteristics for going down the path of outsourcing wasn't rate arbitrage. Consider the fact that if rate arbitrage was the primary driver and with world economics rapidly removing this factor, the only thing left is to figure out how to increasingly cut the head count of your offshore development staff.

On another note, I haven't ran across a single IT executive who believes in outsourcing that had a prior military background. Maybe us American's should not only consider the need for Strong Technical Leadership but also where one's allegiances reside. After all, if you are more interested in seeing someone else succeed over your own team, then there is no hope for you to ever be a real leader...

By a show of hands, how many folks in India believe that America should stop outsourcing work to India because it has unintended consequences for this great nation?

Portals and IdP Discovery
Conor Cahill responds to a question that unfortunately I didn't ask. If I did ask Conor a question, it would be some insight into when Project Liberty will start paying attention to XACML?

Is open-source software support better than closed-source software support?
Open source companies sell closed source extensions because “they’re trying to give the customer a convenient reason to purchase even when support won’t trigger a purchase decision. It’s not a model that I like, but it’s one that I can understand I wonder if Matt Asay understands it because at some level he encourages this model to be propogated amongst the community? I wonder what his thoughts are on the model used by Liferay which makes money as well as doesn't hold back access to source code?

Growth through reaching the participation fringe
Industry Analyst Alex Fletcher asks an interesting question as to why the non-paying user is vital to the success of open source. My general thought is that us enterprise types are many times constrained by restrictive media relations policies of our employers which removes our ability to talk about software vendors we spend money with. Remove the money aspects and the constraint of viral marketing also gets removed.

Sun in Gartner's Leader's Quadrant
I wonder if Mark Dixon understands that Gartner uses the word leader in a different way than most folks. It is a predictor that you lead in the amount of monies paid to Gartner as there are zero open source products in any section of the quadrant. Likewise, leadership in the market also has a non-financial dimension like setting standards, evangelism of things to non-Sun products to incorporate SPML and so on

Philippines Catching up with India in the Outsourcing Industry
I suspect that in three years, India will lose so much marketshare due to suboptimal delivery that Philippines, China and Brazil will take the dominate spot

Blue Max 2200 PSI Pressure Washer
Amazon has for $136.95 for all you tool fans

Free online course for Sun Java System Identity Manager
Sun evangelist Sang Shin is teaching this course, so I know it will rock. Too bad he isn't teaching security patterns

User-Centric may also mean user-responsible
Jeff Bohren talks about a problem where the notion of attestation and indemnification of identity seems to be a missing characteristic in many OpenID providers. The problem is that OpenID providers will not take on risk unless they also take on revenue which may resort to something uglier like charging per dereference

Open source organization seeks pro-bono attorney
I wonder if I could convince Bruce Perens to move open source away from those liberal left coasters towards conservative New England as I know of several whom would gladly volunteer. Sadly, though none of the lawyers I know are part of the California bar

Charlene Li of Forrester
Mastery of silence is sometimes is the last resort for many

Insights into Enterprise Architecture Tools
Mike Walker comments on the incomplete view that pretty much all EA tools provide and acknowledge that they have a long way to go before they are ready for primetime. I wonder if there are any bloggers from Troux, Popkin, Agilense, Alfabet or others that could provide an alternative perspective?

Preferences and Entitlements
Have you noticed that Jeff Bohren, Nishant Kaushik and other identity bloggers are remaining silent on Shekhar Jha most wonderful posting?

Why Gartner Analysts don't blog
I wonder if other analysts are happy that Gartner doesn't understand how to participate in a larger context?

The software side of IT
I wonder why Gartner only looked at gender diversity and not racial diversity? Both are trending in the wrong direction

Too much outsourcing caused Mattell Recall Problem
I won't mention which Indian outsourcing firm runs IT but you could probably speculate and get it right

Litigation: Sun vs Azul Systems
It is good to see that lawyers from Sun are also blogging. The use of lawsuits to protect intellectual property is further on the rise and it is good to see that it should be avoided at all costs

Freedom of Less Information Act
David Weinberger got it right by calling out how George Bush and the Republicans are eroding the freedoms of Americans

Employers crack down on facebook addicts
I reserve the right to disagree James Governor on the subject of whether employees should have personal areas for viewing content. The problem is that if folks were to view my previous blog entries on BPM which features photos of Bob from Accounting, the lawsuits could still occur regardless of location within the campus. Work is exactly that. If you need to view offensive content within a work context, then there should be special procedures.

ON the Role of "role mining" in Enterprises
I really hate stealth blog entries that don't talk about why and where role mining activities fail. In fact, I would love it if somewhere were to blog a comparison of starting with role mining vs starting with entitlements management and let the coins fall where they may

NIST Web Services Security Guide
It is a good read for Enterprise Architects going down the path of SOA who want security built-in. I suspect that none of the ECM vendors will read it though.

I have been busy gathering the opinion of others as to why Gartner analysts en masse do not blog...



Figured I would list a couple of reasons. If you know of more, please do not hesitate to leave a trackback...

High Level Conversations: Gartner analysts are so used to having high-level conversations with their end-customer base being comprised of non-technical IT executives that they realize they aren't capable of providing the detail level of insight required to be credible within the blogosphere. Many bloggers simply would ignore the regurgitation of common sense. Sure, common sense is uncommon but that doesn't mean we should spend money hearing it.

Consider the following phrases such as it is important for IT to have strong business buy-in or make sure your projects have a positive ROI or even make sure you have strong business requirements as part of your strategy. If you ever so slightly remix these phrases, they have given many Gartner analysts lift while us bloggers may detect that something else is occurring.

Dialog: If you have been so indoctrinated into having one-way conversations, you probably have no clue as to how to have a conversation in which you don't control. The fear can sometimes be overwhelming or maybe the fear of transparency is stronger

Magic Quadrant: Some wise ass will come along and of course want to make a magic quadrant of all of the industry analyst bloggers where Gartner certainly wouldn't be in the leaders position. In fact, the avoidance of acknowledging that industry analyst bloggers such as James Governor, Stephen OGrady and Michael Cote would dominate. Even bloggers from Burton Group, Forrester and Entiva would amplify this quadrant making controlling the message difficult

throwing daggers: Someone may actually figure out how easy it is to be an analyst. I have always said that I can be an industry analyst for Gartner on any topic and do so without actually researching something. The first thing that I would do is to limit briefings to 1/2 hour. I would most certainly dial into each call, a couple of minutes late and apologize profusely for doing so. I would then use the Peter Covey tactic of seek first to understand, then to be understood by asking the end customer to provide an overview of their problem space. Hopefully, I can count on them rambling for a good fifteen minutes especially if there are multiple participants on the call. I would then enumerate all the vendors that play in this space and sort the list by whomever paid me the most money. Likewise, I would exercise my right to remain silent on any open source offerings as they wouldn't generate any money for me. I would use the remaining five minutes to remix the phrases outlined in the first bullet and then proceed to let folks know that I have to leave a little early in order to make it to the next call

Analyst Relations: Folks such as Barbara French may lose business because her customers may realize that the notion of analyst relations feels more like spoonfeeding a baby and not anything requiring any depth. She would have to change her business model to helping software vendors to speak in technobabble instead of value

Customers: The ombudsman listens to complaints but hasn't enabled trackback nor unmoderated comments. I suspect that bloggers such as John Domenichini and others may come out of the woodwork. Hugh would probably spend weeks drawing interesting cartoons and providing yet another perspective

So, what's your perspective as to why Gartner analysts aren't blogging?

Bridge Building and IT failures
Good to see that others are starting to acknowledge that IT doesn't fail because of political restrictions on products (aka rationalization), changing requirements or limited budgets. I wonder if folks can attribute failure of IT on the fact that more folks nowadays are focused on perception management over reality, processes over people, management by magazine and using process as a substitute for competence?

Documentum Foundation Services
I ran across a presentation from Craig Randall where he outlines the notion of an object service. I am curious if it is good form to make namespaces read like Java classes? One slide also shows the notion of a SessionID. Maybe I am confused in that Web Services should be stateless?

What is the difference between systems analyst and enterprise architect?
Jeremy Miller gets it twisted by classifying all enterprise architects into the same bucket and reads into my blog by stating there is more focus on business process engineering and IT strategy than technology. If I blog about the lack of secure coding for technology procured by large enterprises, is that strategy or technology? Can folks assume that my blog represents what I do at work in terms of time management and that I don't spend time helping folks write better code because I am too busy drawing high-level Powerpoint all day? While I can say that I have ran across more than my fair share of enterprise architects who doesn't know one iota about technology, I can surely say that pretty much all of my enterprise architect peers at work are also the best technologists.

Applying lean to application development and maintenance
Good to see the folks over at McKinsey thinking about lighter weight processes. I wonder why you never hear about bloggers from Wipro or Accenture talking about agility?

Another horrific ECM WSDL
In the past, I have written about Horrific WSDL in the ECM Domain where this one is from Nuxeo. Should a consumer be expected to know what string_1 represents? I am still awaiting the opportunity to see the Documentum D6 WSDL. I surely hope that it feels like it can participate in a larger context and is not a sloppy wrapper on top of proprietary Documentum APIs. Maybe Craig Randall in the future could speak to WSDL design considerations in an upcoming blog entry.

Given a political environment in which no one person has enough clout to present a design for a system and get it approved, how do you get a design done?



Often, a problem can be clearly identified for which no existing solution fits well. For instance, the Department of Defense figured out in the mid-late 1970s that the existing programming languages that were being used for big military projects just didn't cut it. FORTRAN and COBOL were not going to allow programmers to write the programs necessary to build things like SDI as they didn't provide large-scale programming support, encapsulation, or a host of other things that language designers had decided that were needed. However, no one had the force of personality or knowledge to drive through a single, consistent solution.

The resulting action was to put together a big committee to solve them problem (aka governance). In committee-oriented architectures the notion of driving towards consensus becomes pervasive where it becomes more important for each person to heist their legs add their own unique smell than to drive towards anything that feels like conceptual integrity.

The solution emerged and it is now known as ADA. The language itself met the needs of the government but in hindsight added to the costs of future government projects as average folks were busy learning more traditional languages. For the record, it is was neither super-popular nor a super-failure but only reached the status of mediocrity not unlike most things that are governed. You will also see that the Federal government has moved to languages that the rest of the planet uses and they now have a better chance of success in terms of finding more skilled people to develop applications.

The topic of governance and why enterprise architects should avoid it like the plague will require multiple blog entries. Let's just acknowledge that something needs to occur and since many of us like analogies, I propose we consider the notion of stewardship over governance. Study how unions work in terms of ensuring an agenda and protection of its employees and apply this model to the enterprise and you may find something with more repeatability and conceptual integrity than what passes today as governance...

Forrester, Gartner and Analyst Relations
I wonder why more bloggers aren't commenting on ways to make industry analysis better and have more integrity?

101 Reasons why Java is Better than .NET
I wonder how long will it take for folks to enumerate why Java is also better than Ruby on Rails?

Using your Blog to Change the World
There are multiple ways that bloggers change the world, where some are better than others.

Industry Analysts and the lack of Case Studies on BPM
Ismael Ghalimi, Bruce Silver and Sandy Kemsley will most certainly avoid any response on this blog entry!

Many enterprises resort to adopting the latest hyped industry strategy (aka CMMi, PMIBOK, TOGAF, etc) because they make many mistakes. Why is that? How is that they are so bad at our jobs that we fail so often? The funny thing is if they were more thoughtful, they can't in all honesty blame the methodology or the tools, but people do rise to the occasion...



So, lets enumerate why things fail:

• Incomplete knowledge:We often make decisions on subjects where we don't know all the relevant facts


• Poor communication:People don't always share all necessary knowledge with decision makers


• Changing conditions:A decision based upon today's information may turn out to be wrong tomorrow


• Pressure:People often make mistakes when they have to make decisions too quickly or when under stress


• Complexity:Systems can become so complicated that the developers cannot keep all the details straight. There are limits to the ability of people's minds to process information.


• Process Orientation: Enterprises have way too much focus on process which results in the savage creation of comprehensive documentation. No executive as the wisdom to understand that process is not a substitute for competence

Awhile back, James Tarbell commented on Why architects may be better than engineers but hasn't yet discussed why there is a knowledge crisis in IT. It's not just that people make mistakes, after all we are just silly little human creatures who periodically make mistakes. The enumeration of failure is trivially true and reflects a certain lack of depth of thought to assert all that is required to be truly competent. We are talking about systematic failure whose reach into every part of the enterprise is truly breathtaking and may have no parallel in any other profession.

Maybe we fail not because we need a new methodology but we fail because we are focused on methodologies and not competencies. A mistake within a major IT system means that code has to change.This is methodology-independent. Well-built code, regardless of methodology, should be equally easy/hard to change. I'm not aware of any methodology that requires perfection, that says don't test, that says spread duplicate code everywhere, or that says spend three years developing useless code. Developers may do this, but that's a lack of skill on their part. Focusing on the latest methodologies simply isn't required but focusing on making folks competent is.

Some of the latest trends within IT is the notion of power vendors and strategies around rationalization. Should we ever ask ourselves what does it mean to remove tools that benefit individual craftsman within our enterprise? What would happen if engineers were asked to build buildings like we're asked to write software? Limited budget, political restrictions on tools, short schedules, things that have not really been done before, and requirements changing on the fly. If you had to build a bridge in such an environment, it would fall...

The War on Working Americans
Folks are too busy justifying globalization and outsourcing by looking at unemployment numbers while exercising their right to remain silent on the loss of actual wages earned by individual workers. When will Americans understand that outsourcing to India will result in an unprecendented fall in worker standards of living in both countries

SOA is not about integration
If ECM vendors deliver to customers poorly designed WSDL that merely wraps APIs then it becomes all about integration. Is the answer for customers to start calling out those responsible for this travesty?

Workflow Patterns
I wonder if Mark Masterson understands that there are additional patterns of workflow when applied to identity-specific problem spaces that aren't covered in his link?

The Business doesn't ask for utility computing
I wonder what it will take for enterprise architects to realize that selling the need for SOA outside of IT within their enterprises is a bad idea

Caveat Emptor! Sound Advice for IT Buyers
Of course in simple terms the vendors are trying to sell you as much IT kit as they possibly can for as much money as they can get out of you, but there are more subtle tricks and ploys worth being aware of.

Can Bloggers save Technorati meme?
The need to make Technorati stronger should happen sooner rather than later

The end of the Benchmark boy's club
VC firms tend to discriminate against women where many of them have never had a woman partner. Looks like this will change in 2007

Pros and Cons of captive offshore operations
Research has found that offshore operations in countries such as Brazil and the Philippines have a better chance for success than offshore within India

FUD about Ruby on Rails
Let's use twisted logic to make a point. A blog about the potential of writing a secure application in different languages gets twisted into a commentary about pervasive habit within languages. In the same way that the Republican party has the potential to stand for something meaningful, they also have the freedom to exercise their right to be idiots

Industry Vertical Specific Identity Management
I haven't heard Pat Patterson, Jackson Shaw, Mark MacAuley, Matt Flynn, Nishant Kaushik or Jeff Bohren ever discuss the concept and/or need for vertical specific identity management solutions. Maybe this is the reason why there is only mediocrity in terms of success with many of the tools in this space

Tower of IT Babel
It easy to admonish IT for speaking techno-babble to its customers but what is the root cause for such practices?

Oracle buys Bridgestream
Good to see that the folks over at the The 451 Group are staying on top of acquisitions. The funny thing is that Bridgestream, Eurikify and others in this space have poor analyst coverage which may be the reason why the purchase price was so cheap. It may serve their competitors to spend more in terms of analyst coverage/insight

State faults teachers of English learners
Hundreds of students in Arizona are trying to learn English from teachers who don’t know the language. Maybe this is an opportunity to outsource teaching to India so that they can learn an even more horrible form of English that few Americans can understand

What is an EMC technical architect
I wonder if EMC as part of their certifications should expect architects to understand SOA and Security or will questions around this be missing in action?

Open Source ECM
I was heavily disappointed to know that only the source code for parts of Alfresco were open source as they use the dual licensing/partitioning notion I so despise. For folks that know me, I tend to go through moodswings in terms of contributing to open source projects. Since, I believe that the world of ECM is so fugly when it comes to understanding security, it was my thought to do two things. First, I figured I would help cleanup portions of code where insecure coding practices may have been used. Likewise, I also wanted to inject support for XACML and help decouple the otherwise ECM domain indoctrination into ACL approaches. Sadly, the code I want to modify is in their enterprise version where the ability to contribute isn't available.

Documentum D6
Laurence Hart provides insight into Documentum but also provides some scary phrases. The first phrase is a 25% increase in resources by upgrading. Shouldn't software get better and more efficient upon each release? He also refers to a sizing spreadsheet which is curious. I would speculate that one does not exist because it would force customers to use professional services if they want to be an early adopter? It could also mean that they are busy figuring a more active way of calculating performance/sizing by creation of a wizard that looks at current metrics of existing systems without having a user back into it? I would think such a utility would be useful, kinda an upgrade wizard. Of course this means this should be a service pack to previous versions