Innovation in Software

The way I understand it, there are two groups inside Microsoft right now: I shall refer to them (even if nobody else does) as the Old Guard and the New Guys.

The Old Guard are the guys who built Microsoft in the first place. They’re the ones that we might consider the Evil Empire. They thought about software as a means to make money in itself. IPR and tools like DRM were critical to their thinking about how software should work. They’re the ones the EU don’t like. They’re the ones we’re a bit tired of in the open source community. They want your money.

The New Kids have seen a little more of the World as it really is. They think that software is a tool to sell services, training, knowledge, and that things like IPR and DRM get in the way of incredible creative freedoms. To them being able to mix in with as many people as possible is more important than trying to make sure that Microsoft locks you in: they want to win by producing the best tools possible. They want your heart and soul, feeling your money will follow.

The Old Guard is, naturally, getting older. They’re retiring. The New Kids are getting more important. They’re rising through the ranks. They’re able to make decisions. They’re the future.

We’ve just seen another small move in the battle that the New Kids are winning.

Give them time. They’re getting it.

There is something about the phrase “Enterprise Content Management” that immediately makes me think of large piles of wasted cash being spent on consultants talking crap.

Apparently that’s all about to change, thanks to the British Standards Institute, who are going to “develop a standard” for it, thereby putting the World to rights.

Do you know why most standards fail in software? Because organisations like the BSI try and define them.

Successful software standards are extracted, never defined.

For example, take the web. The World Wide Web is, as I’m sure you know (but your mother probably doesn’t know), not the same as ‘the Internet’. It is a ‘standard’ that was ‘invented’ by Tim Berners-Lee some 20+ years after the Internet had been around. Except he didn’t invent a standard – he just built some software. Then, after it exploded in popularity, a bunch of people realised they should probably work out a standard so it would be easier for designers, browser developers and users to make use of the web. It took years but by extracting something meaningful out of the existing software and nailing a few details down, the W3C were able to produce a standard.

Since then, the W3C hasn’t really produced anything but standards. As a standards body, they thought that was what their job was. As a result, we now have piles and piles of very interesting looking documentation but no really interesting implementations. We’ve had XHTML and CSS, but when was the last time you really took a look at OWL, GRDDL, or even for that matter RDF? No, go on, really?

So, what kind of standards can we expect the BSI to come up with for ECM?

Let me give you a taste of the state ECM is in today. Take a look at the ECM Wikipedia entry

“Parts of this article may be confusing or unclear”

You can say that again.

In autumn 2005 AIIM defined ECM as follows:

Enterprise Content Management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.

Still with us? It gets worse.

In winter 2006 AIIM added the following paragraph to the definition:

ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists

Nobody can quite decide which components are needed and which aren’t, except that where you have “unstructured information” (hint: information without structure is just plain data, not information), you should apply “some” ECM to it. Or at least you could. Maybe you just need to define the workflow instead… or maybe you don’t need workflow, you just need to understand storage… or perhaps you need to think about multi-platform delivery… see?

How you do any of that is all up for grabs. There are hundreds of products that claim to be able to sort this out. Quite frankly if you have an intranet wiki, you’re probably on the on-ramp to ECM to some people, but for other consultants you’re not even getting started until you’ve defined a bespoke J2EE project and had IBM walk around your office for the last year. If you upload your public documents to edocr are you engaging in ECM? If you have moderators on the company blog, is that ECM? If you version control all internal documents, is that ECM?

It is a mess. It needs sorting out. I have a horrible feeling though, that the BSI is just going to produce a lot more paperwork, and no software is going to come out of this. I hope to be proved wrong.