Kelly-

I found this statement in the blog sort of interesting (conceptually):

"However, over the last decade, a number of interesting trends have turned
this relationship upside down:

Acquiring and storing data is headed toward zero cost.
Exposing, moving and transforming data has become very easy and cost efficient.
Self Service Everything – Personal databases and web portals, self-service
business intelligence.  Often non-developers build and own.
Excel hell - The great proliferation of Excel (and Access, Sharepoint) as
the enterprise data management tool."

I find some of these to be mis-assumptions. Acquiring/storing is far from
"zero cost", it still requires effort on the part of workers and time to
manage.  It also is CHEAPER to store, but the costs sort of become
exponential if you take a 'laissez faire' attitude and keep everything
because its cheap, which is sort of where this whole project sounds as if
it's heading.

Moving and transforming data is something we as RMs attempt to discourage,
unless you are recording where it came from what you've done with it and why
you're keeping it.  Re-purposing data has it's place in business but in our
practices, that results in creating a new record, which must be properly
described and also retained.

Self service works- 'personal' within a business context doesn't.  And I see
business analytics/intelligence as organizational efforts that are
self-service form a "use" standpoint, but they typically have an
organizational structure.

The Excel/Access/Sharepoint dealio makes me believe this is being looked at
as Micro$oft first, all others can follow along if they want- so it sounds
as if the product/service is being designed to serve the M$ Office
environment more than anything broader. 

And I found these statements sort of odd:

"However it has also made even the simplest DBA and ETL developer tasks
increasingly complex and error prone.   On top of that, it is almost
impossible for information workers to know anything about enterprise data
outside of their specific data silos."

"But do the IT folks really have time to help the information workers? "

I guess it all depends on the size/scope/complexity of your organization. In
some instances these silos are by design- and while the concept of
information silos conjures up a visual of segregation/separation of data,
this is many times by design- not accident.  Certain information sets must
be isolated and are not designed to be 'crawled' by others.  

If you're an "organization of one' you'll want everything in one big pool
and you'll want to be able to dive in and grab anything when you want it.
Even if you're an organization of 20-30 and you're a start-up where rampant
collaboration is necessary to development and design, you MAY want this for
a vast majority of your information, but as time progresses, there is some
of this that needs to be isolated and protected (siloed) from others.  And
in large organizations with functional structures and privacy, intellectual
property and other concerns, this becomes more prevalent. 

The idea of an IT organization NOT HAVING TIME to meet 'information workers'
needs doesn't sit well with me.  I've often said that IT provides the tools,
RIM make the rules- and the whole reason IT staff is available is to ensure
an organizations Information Assets remain accessible to meet its business
needs. 

If DBA and ETL workers tasks have become more complex and 'error prone'
maybe they aren't using the right tools (applications), or are lacking
training in areas related to the tasks they are performing. Creating an
ocean of information that everyone has access to will only result in the
potential for more errors and greater complexity. 

I'm all for collaboration and sharing of information within the proper
context for an organization, and I support the concepts of Enterprise
Content Management systems and services (within a structured environment),
but I think this Barcelona Project has a lot of holes in it as currently
defined/described.  

I enjoyed the comments to the blog as much (if not more) than the blog
itself.  And I see he dove in and tried to respond to most of the
questions/comments submitted except the ones that asked the REAL HARD
questions (like Kelly's) and I'm thinking its because they are things they
haven't thought about or never considered. 

This sort of reminds me of the Vegas ARMA Conference where a group of us RMs
approached the Google booth and started asking "RM type questions" about the
Gmail and Google Docs services when they were first offered as enterprise
applications.  They sort of tipped their heads and looked at each other and
then said "Why would you want to do that?" and "Does anyone do that?" and
"Do any organizations need to do that? Why?"  about common RM practices- and
most of the questions we asked that day still remain unanswered within these
applications.

Larry
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