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February 21, 2005

Open Source Products and Compliance

James McGovern, writing in his February 18th  IT toolbox blog, asks for more analyst engagement and coverage regarding open source options for users.  He suggests ...

Maybe the next step is to get several analysts who blog to expose themselves to a vocal audience. Maybe they could ping this entry's trackback and let the dialog begin. Online audiences routinely discuss, debate and refute industry analyst research.

I think that would be great.  Sign me up ... I would be happy to contribute.  But, what what would be even more useful, for me -- certainly more useful than discussions of industry analyst research -- would be hearing more about what open source platforms and tools are turning out to be most valuable as companies implement compliance solutions.

In my own work as an analyst/writer over the last decade I have discovered some things that match up--at least in a rough way--with McGovern's concerns.  I started out sizing markets, projecting growth, figuring up market share, and so on.  I learned a couple of things after a few years of this.  One is that it is hard to predict the future.  A second thing was that the methodologies available for estimating current market size and market share in markets that are relatively young and still emerging are subject to a lot of error.  You can do it for toothpaste or cola, but there is a lot of guesswork and making of assumptions when you are looking at something like "content management" or, heaven forbid, "compliance." 

But perhaps the most striking, humbling thing that I learned is that the market sizes, growth projections, and so on that I worked so hard to create are typically not useful to the people and firms that actually USE technology.  It is critically important stuff for technology vendors ... but technology users are more concerned about what works than they are with the size of the market. 

So, I don't do market size estimates anymore.  I am much more interested in finding out what people are doing and what works.

As I look at Sarbanes Oxley and other compliance issues, the question of "what works?" seems more important than ever.

So, James, I really like the idea of using trackbacks and other tools to get a discussion going that brings more open source tools to the forefront.  But, rather than worrying about what the analysts think, I would be more interested in finding out more about what companies are using, for what applications, and what is working. 

I see that James Governor of RedMonk is also interested in joining the conversation.  (I will say a bit more about RedMonk's interesting thinking about "Compliance Oriented Architecture" in a separate post.)  With James on board, along with some people who are using open source approaches to compliance, I think we could have a conversation that would be both interesting and really useful.

Posted by Bill Zoellick at February 21, 2005 9:19 PM

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Tracked on October 28, 2005 7:56 AM

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Posted by: rck at March 19, 2005 9:40 AM

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