Good to see software that treats business objects and business processes as first class citizen. Currently, enterprise information systems largely fail to deliver in time and are a big threat to business adaptability. Enterprise information systems are made of a very large number of applications, which are connected in different ways. Today, IT organizations spend most of their time and money tying all these applications together in order to build an integrated information system.

I think that the problem comes from the nature of the application itself. Applications are built to help businesses realize their objectives. Therefore, business people expect things from an information system from their specific point of view. In fact, an application is an automated system which embodies a specific point of view on business objects and executes a process from the narrow viewpoint of a small number of business users. An application is just an implementation of a business process, and the business objects they need. As a result, an application embodies a narrow ontology of the enterprise ontology. With time, you have different representations within your information system. The information system integration task is to connect all these different narrow ontologies to build a global ontology from the point of view of the enterprise.

If we want to have an integrated information system, we have to stop building applications that are specific to a small class of business users, and instead build a system that is aligned with the needs of the business itself, being treated as a first class citizen. A firm is an organization that takes things or services as input and combines or transforms them to build new things or services. Therefore, their first class citizens are these things or services they use and the way they use them in order to build other things or services. Things or services are called business objects and the way firms use them is called business processes.

I think that if we build enterprise information systems from the viewpoint of the business, we will never have all these problems of ontology integration, because processes will be integrated right from the design phase. I believe that the reason why the ERP has been successful at integrating global information systems is because it was built in an integrated manner. Of course, it comes with its own drawbacks, especially its rigidity. But at least we know that an integrated enterprise information system is possible. IT organizations have to go beyond being the owners of applications and become the owners of business objects and business processes. And because accountability cannot really be shared, any business object and business process must have a clearly identified owner.

I try to explain my views on my blog. It’s in French though ;-)

Thank you for the very detailed background information. I will take a look.

Thanks for your answer. As for your comment about bridging the gap between unstructured content and structured data, it seems to me that IBM is bringing UIMA (Unsturcture Information Management Architecture) based products to market under an Open Source license to address this issue. You can understand this better than me by accessing Marc Andrews’ blog. You can also take a look at Alfred Sepcto’s presentation on Semantic Accceleration for Practical Web focusing on UIMA, and Charles Lickel’s research work on Situational Software & Consumable IT.

I tend to agree with Rod Smith’s views, but one problem remains to be solved: how do you bridge the gap between unstructured content and structured data, or to me more precise, between publishing (a blog, a wiki) and transaction processing (an online database)? I had this discussion a month ago with Ross Mayfield, Socialtext’s CEO, and we pretty much reached the same conclusion: it’s a pretty darn difficult problem to solve, and as long as it’s not solved, DIY-IT will have limited scope with respect to IT’s responsibility to deal with the reliable and secure processing of transactions.

Looks like James Governor at Redmong shares similar views on Thingamy on his blog. I would appreciate your view, if any, on IBM’s “Do it yourself - IT” as it was covered by Rod Smith at O’Reilly’s ETech this year.