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Big Blue's Software Spending Spree
abb_road writes "IBM has gone on an aggressive acquisitions spree for document management packages in the past three weeks, spending more than $2 billion to pick up two companies. The companies, Webify and FileNet, are expected to become part of IBM's Information on Demand strategy. The acquisitions point to a larger industry trend: a focus on software for unified corporate data management. From the article: 'It's a crucial time to jockey for most-valuable-software-provider status, because companies want to buy more from fewer players, and they're tired of buying stand-alone pieces of software like customer-relationship management that don't fix real-world business problems. The new message to software vendors: Fix my call centers, don't just sell me a product. As a result, the lines are starting to blur between software companies that offer, say, Internet security, databases, and tools to manage nearly every part of the business. So, too, are the lines between service companies and software companies.'"
Don't even think of telling me that IBM are buying customers or market share! It's painfully obvious that the market is overvalued.
IBM definitely has the resources to create many of these software services themselves for alot less money. I think it's as much about buying these companies up before the competition can than getting the software.
Developers: We can use your help.
The big question is, how is this all going to integrate? IBM already has it's own document management system that competes against FileNet in a lot of areas. So, is one going to go away? Or perhaps they'll continue to sell both and basically bring their credibility down for both. Not only that, but with FileNet phasing out one of their products and forcing their user base to upgrade, will FileNet lose a lot of their base because they don't trust that it will be around much longer? There are a lot of questions without much of an answer. Sure one hell of an impulse buy.
Every job I have ever had has a pattern with IT: Our people aren't sharing information or documenting their work properly, lets spend X to upgrade our computers...Our people aren't sharing information or documenting their work properly, lets spend X2 to upgrade our computers...Our people aren't sharing information or documenting their work properly, lets spend X4 to upgrade our computers...and so on.
People need to start being more organized before any data-management software dose a bit of good.
We are the Borg...
It seems to me that computers are progressively becoming less and less about computing, and more and more about simply storing and communicating data. A long time ago, IBM bought out Lotus software. Lotus became famous based on 1-2-3. It was the "killer app" that sold tons of DOS machines -- and oriented heavily toward doing computation. I'm not sure if IBM even still sells 1-2-3 or anything derived from it -- the big Lotus-derived products are Notes and Domino (I.e. storing and communicating data, not doing actual computing). In fact, you hardly hear about spreadsheets any more. Excel works, and a lot of people use it, but it doesn't seem to be a "killer app" for much of anybody anymore -- I'm pretty sure I haven't heard of anybody buying a machine to run it (or any other spreadsheet) in years.
Now acquisitions (and new development) seem to be oriented almost entirely toward storing and communicating data, not toward doing any actual computing. The same seems to be happening in software development as well. Languages for doing real computation, like FORTRAN and Matlab are almost universally seen as boring and passe. Even languages like C++ oriented kind of halfway toward computation seem to be viewed as a whole less less than exciting, anyway. What's hot are things like Ruby on Rails. Of course, you can write computational code in Ruby if you want to, but I'm pretty sure nearly nobody uses Ruby to do things like matrix multiplication -- they use it for Rails, to set up web sites that talk to databases (storing and communicating data).
In fairness, I suppose I should add that there are still a few "big things" oriented heavily toward real computation -- Folding@home and Seti@home for a couple of obvious ones -- and BOINC has a number of less obvious/well-known ones as well. Clearly computation isn't entirely dead and gone or anything like that.
I'm a little uncertain what this emphasis on simply storing and communicating data really means though. Was most computing that involved real computation really just a fad, and people were doing it primarily because it was new and different? Is the current emphasis on data storage and communication really just a fad, and people will care a lot less about it in a few years? Is it a matter of the "computing" parts of things mostly being cured problems, so they're less apparent, even though they're really as important as ever?
I suppose for this to be a proper comment, I should have a strong opinion to express about it, but I really don't -- at least for me it's almost entirely an open question.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Hmm. Was the summary written by an IBMer by any chance? I don't see the words "on demand" or "business transformation" or anything like that, but...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Reminds me of this .
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Good question.
;-)
:-)
It's about control and structure.
The usual question is "why can't I just use our shared mapped drives?" - so here's what you DON'T get from shared mapped drives that you do get from a Document Management System (DMS):
* Metadata... Basic metadata on the document which can help searching, and can sometimes be sorted upon etc. The metadata often varies with the "document type" - so tender documents/procurement documents have an Account field, where meeting minutes instead have an Attendees field. Yes, this takes more time to fill in when saving a document into a DMS. This is why users hate the DMS. Business loves it, of course, because it makes things easy to find years later.
* Structure... You create the overall structure, and nobody can change it. We've all seen file shares that have had no control - they become an impenetrable mess of folders, because everyone has their own slightly different filing system they're adhering to. DMS software allows an organisation to enforce just one filing system. Users hate that, too.
* Conflict Prevention... Most DMS software has the concept of "checking out" a document, just like you would check out a book at the library. Whilst you have that document checked out, everyone can see you're working on it - and nobody else can check it out. This prevents two idiots^Wusers from applying changes to the same document. Checking a document out also allows for an audit trail to be built.
* Versioning... Beyond the versioning that you get in Word - this is literally keeping a copy of every version that was checked in. You can usually also add a metadata comment for each vesrion when you check it in, to say what you changed. Often, you can even do this for each draft. Oh, by the way, being able to mark documents as either drafts or versions is also handy, and many systems do that.
* Audit trails... Not your aneamic logs from an OS, but audit trails telling you who updated the document and when, often going back years. Very important in some environments.
* Approval/Review Cycles... Workflow is a common extension to many DMS implementations, adn allows for simple approval/review cycles in which the checking out/audit trail/versioning features are combined to allow one person and one person only to approve or review at a time. Quite handy, if done well.
* Records Management... Technically something else entirely, but records management often goes hand-in-hand with document management systems. Do all your invoices become unneeded after seven years? Fine - save 'em to the right place, and the DMS will handle that for you. Anything over seven years old simply gets removed, permanently, on a schedule. For you, this is useless. For a company GM's size, this saves hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
* Searching... As alluded to above, most DMS software has a full-text search capability these days, and if it's "in the box" then it's one less thing to have to implement in your IT strategy.
There's more, but you get the idea. It's basically there to control the way people work with documents, making sure that it's less likely to descend into a SNAFU where you can never find what you want...
It's not like we don't have examples of classification systems that work. Finding a piece of information in a library might take a few minutes to locate a set of data, and then minutes to review material and find a fact, or hours or days to poll opinions and assemble an informed picture of the subject under investigation. Indexing schemas in document management are evaluated by how many clicks it takes to get to an already known piece of information.
Or maybe it is that the business metrics applied to this sort of activity are based on the speed and volume rather than the quality of work? If a poor decision was made through a lack of information, was it the difficulty in locating this information, or was it a lack of will or desire to adequately research a decision before making it?
Document management is a technique for turning all the crappy little internal web sites in your company running Apache, PHPNuke, or some random blogging thing into giant bloated internal web sites with exactly the same content, overpriced on-site consultants, and $50K per year support contracts.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"