Intelligent Enterprise

A couple recent news items find SAP and IBM both in a bit of legal hot water.

U.S.-based über-trash-collector Waste Management Inc. is suing SAP for a whopping $100 million, alleging that the ERP vendor demoed some very convincing vaporware, covering up a fundamental inability to meet stated requirements.

Meanwhile, IBM has been suspended from any new federal contracts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — an extraordinary, if likely temporary, measure — after some alleged hanky-panky involving a failed contract bid and aggressive appeal. There's talk of potential criminal investigations of both EPA and IBM employees.

I don't know how either of these disputes will turn out, but from the news reports alone they raise several important issues for technology customers working with large (I mean really large) vendors.

The CMS Watch Web CMS Report, calls out MOSS 2007 as having "perhaps the highest fee structure in its class," — by which we mean among mid-market and departmental solutions — particularly when used as a Web CMS for a public site. Seems others agree.

At the Gilbane Conference keynote last week, execs from enterprise content management vendors Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe focussed on — perhaps inevitably — Enterprise 2.0. The overall gist was: enterprises should focus on sharing information rather than just controlling it.

Well of course that's true. But it's always been true.

Recently at cmf2007 Raimond Kempees, a developer and consultant at Radagio, gave a nice talk assessing MOSS 2007. Among other things, Raimond relayed some of the challenges he and other developers have experienced with Web Parts. It all reminded me of the love/hate relationship customers endure with portlets in the Java portal world.

On the one hand, the Web Parts framework is very attractive for plugging widgets into dashboard-type pages. In addition to what ships natively with SharePoint, you can find lots of third-party Web Parts. But their quality and safety varies substantially, and inevitably you need to extend them... and then how do you handle support? There is also perennial confusion and inconsistency about how much logic to put in the presentation tier, and how much to place in objects behind the scenes.

There's a particular Dilbert cartoon making the rounds that pokes good fun at Web 2.0 in general and "folksonomies" in particular.

Surely there is much to satirize here. Cartoonist Scott Adams is particularly adept at surfacing (and pillorying) vague but alluring-sounding words like "folksonomy" and "platform" that, yes, we all over-use. But getting Dilberted also represents a certain coming of age, marking a concept passing from obscurity to early-stage hype, at least among tech and information management types.

This week, CMS Watch officially kicks off a formal training program. In conjunction with AIIM, we are providing classroom workshops (leading to official AIIM designations) in Information Organization & Access (IOA) and Business Process Management (BPM).

I'm very excited about these new courses. CMS Watch undertook the coursework development under the guidance of AIIM's Educational Advisory Group, and both organizations will be leading courses throughout North America, Europe, and (next year) Asia-Pacific. Here's why these courses are so terribly important.

I've been attending a lot of vendor demonstrations on behalf of clients recently. These are in-person demos, typically following a tight script, after a set of vendors has been down-selected following written proposals. More often than not, the demos don't turn out very well. To be sure, sometimes the customer is ill-prepared. But more frequently, the vendor just flubs it. I think that's avoidable.

As a rule CMS Watch does not give advice to vendors. Moreover, we stress the decisive importance of more advanced, proof-of-concept test phases as the real measure of suitability. But demos are important for vetting finalists for any proof-of-concept, and I've come to believe that customers could really benefit from better ones.

The hype around enterprise portals seems to have subsided, but I believe genuine interest remains high. Yesterday at the annual AIIM Expo, we held an "Enterprise Portal Smackdown," in which a packed room of document and records managers keenly watched seven-minute demos presented by different consultancies (Ironworks, Molecular, and Liferay) demonstrating, respectively: BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and Liferay Portal. Here's a very brief summary of the demos:

AIIM Europe has just completed a major piece of research in the UK that reveals that the number of firms deploying ECM there has doubled in the last two years. In addition, AIIM finds that the number of firms now trying to integrate ECM projects across departments has risen steeply. Another interesting piece of research released in the last week revealed that around 25 percent of enterprises now at least claim to run a services oriented architecture, and that number is set to grow rapidly.

For the past two decades I've heard about the "coming convergence" in enterprise software between the data and content sides -- or, if you like (I don't like, but other people do) -- between structured and unstructured information management. This always seemed like more of a vendor fantasy than real enterprise need, but let's acknowledge that CRM and ERP systems use free-form text fields and document attachments, while Web CMS and Records Management systems need good data to run.

Managing an intranet seems inherently an overwhelming task. First, there's the word, intranet. It sounds important, huge, nebulous, and boundless at the same time. In most enterprises, the opportunities for internal information sharing, collaboration, and process improvements are, well, limitless...but also very difficult to pull off.

We continue to look closely at the intersection between Web content management and Web analytics. There are several important issues here, but one keeps reappearing. It revolves around the growing tendency to use page tags in lieu of (or in addition to) log files for data collection.

Google's recent announcement that it upgraded the "Mini" version of its Search Appliance ("GSA") inspires me to share some useful links that have been accumulating:

It felt confessional to explain to a friend the other day that typically my greatest value as a consultant comes from helping enterprises avoid making a big mistake. Usually the looming mistake is selecting the wrong software for their needs. That just doesn't sound as triumphant as "restored them to profitability," or "instituted a fabulously successful publishing regimen."

Someone tell the vendors. Two fine blog entries point out that search vendors miss the point when they reposition themselves as business intelligence or business processing suppliers. Gilbane's Lynda Moulton finds vendors attempting to "stave off their own boredom" with enterprise search. MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg sees search vendors as "distracted with a strategic vision."

When I talk to software vendors about customer projects that were seriously delayed or that failed outright, the response is almost invariably: "implementation problem." That's code-speak for the customer or integrator (or both) screwing up. Sometimes this rings true, though I suspect more commonly implementation troubles result from a poor product fit.

In a world in which vendors dominate marketplace conversations -- by underwriting conferences, the trade press, Webinars, white papers and trade associations -- assigning blame to others for our industry's ridiculously low success rate is weaseling out.

Microsoft SharePoint is famous for its ease of creating -- and abandoning -- local workgroup portals. As readers of our latest Enterprise Portals Report know, this has not fundamentally changed in MOSS 2007. That could be a problem.

It seems that the world is almost slowing down a bit as Microsoft readies a final version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the quite substantial upgrade to a nearly ubiquitous SharePoint 2003. SharePoint is many things to many people, but customers typically deploy it as a lightweight collaboration portal. With this latest version, Microsoft is trying to extend the product's reach. Microsoft has certainly broadened SharePoint functionally, but sometimes "enterprise" means depth as well as breadth, and some of the old shortcomings (such as performance and administration) persist.