ECM Standards - Which one? What for?
Bex over at BexHuff.com has an interesting article on the lack of ECM standards and the implications thereof. He points out that it's not that there is a lack of ECM standards, but rather there is a proliferation of ECM standards. These tend to be less evolutionary and try to be more revolutionary. The result is that the standards stick around and compete with one another in the market. Meanwhile for businesses to comply, with them all, a race to the bottom often ensues ("our ECM systems meet all relevant standards - they run on computers, mostly").
The result for vendors and software crafters (like us), if I infer correctly from Bex's article, is a race to the lowest common denominator across all the standards in order to say, "yeah, we meet that standard" while trying to actually put in real features that are useful.
WebDAV? - SURE!, ODMA? - oh yeah, JSR170? - yeah, we can do that. The problem, as Bex points out, is that real world businesses require capabilities that not specified or even contraindicated by standards bodies. As Bex points out:
Any customer limiting their enterprise to just those basic ECM services will be horribly disappointed at the lack of features. I know of one major customer who was extremely gung-ho about "standard" ECM interfaces, until they realized that the standards lacked vitally important features. Now they never use them.
In the view of this blogger, standards may be useful starting points for clients and folks looking at software (ANY software). But a standard will not define YOUR business. It tries to define the lowest common denominator across all businesses-abstracted.
Standards can help you think yourself outside of your own head and clue you into to other things that may be important to you, at some not too distant point. The assumption is that you already know what is important to you now, but you want your software investment to be useful tomorrow as well as today.
Beyond that, standards do jack for the way you do business. You may do some of your business in a standards compliant way, but never all of it.
Software should meed your business needs and prepare you for the future.
Anyway, see Bex's article.
