At the core of what I encourage in many of my projects and in what I speak about is that the center of applications, architectures, processes, integrations, etc. is the content. Whether we are speaking about the general technology solutions or specifically content management system, remember, it’s about useful businesses content. Disappointingly many technologists convert the issue into being a technology problem. Don’t get me wrong a majority of products are difficult to implement but we shouldn’t concern a business process with technological issues. We as technologists need to be ready to support that business process. I recently read (and listened) to some confirmations on this topic, while reviewing some of my RSS subscriptions.
David Linthicum’s podcast of the importance of data in your architecture, http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/IFW_SOA_12-12-06.mp3.
Dave Kellogg writes about content being at the center of your architecture, http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2006/12/whats-at-center-of-your-content.html.
James McGovern writes a nice note about ECM vendors and their stubbornness, http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2006/12/enterprise-content-management-and.html.
All these writers explain about the need for the enterprises content to be flexible and robust. Most of the larger ECM vendors don’t like this flexibility because, smugly, they already have figured that out and they have the answer for you. We the customers have been asking for content centric applications for so long and now some products, mixed with some healthy technology guidance, can give us the content dexterity that we require.
I think that through a solid implementation of flexible products like Marklogic’s xml db, IBM’s Information Integrator, BEA’s Service Bus and BPM, and someone’s portal (insert OSS portal of choice) we can have a content centric architecture that can host many requirements of the business. We can satisfy the various requirements of the business (virtually) regardless of the underlying system that stores the data. Of course there are some other products that can assist the optimization of content throughput like datagrids and grid computing but I think those products are still maturing through the enterprises content systems.
Stay tuned for my C3 plan (content to consumer, content’s business processes, and content composition) which should cover initial steps to capturing content requirements to start a content centric solution.
