Month: February 2005 (Page 2 of 8)

Leading analysts, consultants, and practitioners from a dozen countries explore the latest content technology technologies, trends, and practices – Preliminary program now available

Contacts:
Joy Blake Scott
Longleaf Public Relations
joy@longleafpr.com
Jeffrey Arcuri
Lighthouse Seminars
781-821-6634
jarcuri@lighthouseseminars.com

Cambridge, MA, February 23, 2005. The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars announced that the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies to take place in Amsterdam at the RAI Centre, 24-26 May 2005, includes an unprecedented gathering of international experts in content management technologies. The preliminary program for the conference is available at:
www.gilbane.com/conferences/Amsterdam_05_program.html.

The Gilbane Conferences provide vendor neutral educational information for IT managers, system architects, and technically oriented business and project managers. At our Amsterdam conference, experts from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, the US, and more, will cover a broad range of content management technologies including:

• enterprise and web content management
• intranets, knowledge management, and collaboration
• enterprise search, categorization and taxonomies
• document management & compliance
• and many other technologies for creating, managing and delivering with enterprise content

“Our educational conferences includes everything IT Strategists and project teams need to know in a hype-free environment and offer insights into existing and upcoming technologies necessary to implement content management applications,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair. “Nothing can compare with the rich in-depth learning experience of being surrounded by subject matter experts and industry colleagues from all over the globe who are at various stages of implementing initial, or second or third projects that you can learn from”.

As an added bonus, attendees of the Gilbane Conference will be able to attend sessions at the co-located XTech 2005, giving attendees of both events unprecedented educational and networking opportunities. Formerly known as the XML Europe conference, XTech has widened its scope to incorporate neighboring technologies from the web and business. As well as XML, XTech 2005 will cover web development, browsers, open data, the semantic web and more. www.xtech-conference.org/

Justsystem is the Diamond sponsor of the Gilbane Conference. Adobe Systems, and Blast Radius/XMetal are Gold sponsors. Other exhibitors to date include: Antenna House, Astoria Software, AuthorIT, DataDirect Technologies, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) Corporation, O’Reilly, Percussion Software, Quark, Quasar Technologies, Syncro Soft/oXygen, and Vamosa.

Additional Gilbane conferences in 2005 include: San Francisco, April 11-13, and Boston November 29 – December 1. For customer testimonials and more information see: www.gilbane.com/conferences/overview.html

About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report 
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. and the Gilbane Report serve the content management community with vendor neutral publications, conferences and consulting services. They also administer the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INCC), Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Open Text (NASDAQ:OTEX), Trados, Vasont, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN). www.gilbane.com.

About Lighthouse Seminars 
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. www.lighthouseseminars.com

I will start with an analogy.

A long time ago, before XML had been invented and when SGML was a new, radical idea, I often found myself having to explain how SGML was different from the kinds of typesetting codes and other markup that were already familiar to people in publishing. The reason that I was in this spot was that my business partners and I had created a product that produced SGML markup. But nobody, as yet, knew why they would want SGML, much less our product.

The analogy that seemed to work best had to do with cakes and recipes for cakes.  If I give you a cake, all you can do is eat it.  But if I also give you the recipe for the cake, well, then you can bake one for yourself, or
make a bigger one, or a sweeter one, and so on.  SGML was like having the recipe.

Well, it is a wonder that anyone knew what I was talking about. Maybe the pitch worked  because people liked cakes. I suspect that some of them got stuck on the image of eating a cake and then came away with warm feelings about our product. Anyway, what I was trying to get after was the value of abstracting rules. You can deal with the thing (the cake), but you have a lot more power and  flexibility if you deal with the rules for making the thing.  Control of product is great, but control of process is even better.

Which leads, of course, to compliance.

James McGovern sent me a trackback ping from one of his blog entries in which he references a paper by Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk titled “SOA Meets Compliance: Compliance Oriented Architecture.”  The paper came out last summer, but was new to me, and may be new to you.  It is a good read.

You should read the whole paper (it is free), but here is the argument in a nutshell:

• Many companies are taking a “project” approach to compliance requirements.  So, SOX compliance becomes another Y2K problem. And HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance becomes an entirely different project–yet another Y2K.  At least with the real Y2K, there was only one of them …
• This is bad news, since, unlike Y2K, SOX or HIPAA are never “over.”
• This is also bad news because each compliance “project” tends to stand alone–separate resources, costs, and headaches.
• But, in fact, many of the same kinds of information and views of that information are required for the different compliance efforts.

So, the RedMonk paper proposes a “Compliance Oriented Architecture” or “COA,” — a specific instance of a services oriented architecture — so that companies can address different compliance requirements with a single investment in compliance services.

The proposal is another instance of the importance of focusing on the recipe, not the cake.  Rather than rushing off to the store to get all the ingredients for one cake, and then heading out a second time to buy more ingredients for a second cake, you realize instead that there are common ingredients.  With a little planning, you can maybe even bake both cakes at the same time.  (I’m hungry already …)

O’Grady describes the COA as emerging from a “radical–even heretical–notion.”  The heresy is the assumption that there are services that are common to the different regulations with which companies must comply.  The heart of the paper is a table in which O’Grady sketches out a starting list of such core services along with vendors and products that offer these services.

He may be a heretic, but I am sure that O’Grady is right about his core assumption.  Using the old arguments for SGML as an analogy again, the key here is to enable “reuse.”  Companies must move toward
architectures that can support many compliance applications with from a single system.  As with SGML, the key to value is in looking at the process, not the product.

So, it is a good paper.  But I have a misgiving about the focus on “compliance” in “Compliance Oriented Architecture.”  I can see where O’Grady is going … wanting to get companies to stop thinking of SOX, HIPAA, and other compliance requirements as separate projects — seeing them instead as instances of one, bigger thing.  But I wonder whether we shouldn’t perhaps go for something even larger … “Governance?” “Internal Control?”   My discomfort is with “compliance” as a primary objective.

Another analogy:  When driving a night, I “comply” with the 45 mile an hour speed limit on the five miles of narrow road leading  down the peninsula to my house because I want to have the car under control when a moose steps out in front of me.  (So far, I have been able to stop.) Compliance is a good idea, but it is a side effect.  The primary goal is to be able to stop the car in time.

It seems that some of the same thinking applies here, and so I am not sure about “Compliance Oriented.”  But that is a small detail that does not subtract from the real value of O’Grady’s paper.

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.