The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Jon Collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics , 11/27/2006
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In the film 'The Blues Brothers', Jake and Elwood go into a bar. "What kind of music do you usually have here?" asks Elwood. "Oh, we got both kinds," says the lady behind the bar, "We got Country and Western."
While this might be a quite limited perspective on music, information technologists have often been even more myopic. There are two kinds of information, apparently – structured and unstructured – and, we are told, each requires very different handling. The structured world has its own terminologies and constructs, as does the unstructured world, and never the twain have met; or if they have, it’s been an uncomfortable liaison, like divorcees forced together at a family gathering. It’s not just the technology vendors – DBAs care little for taxonomies, and content management types quite probably think "normalised database" is a contradiction in terms.
OK, I generalise - DBAs and others do look over the tops of their cubes from time to time – but the fact remains that there are two, discrete sides. Business people, those trying to actually use the information, would be right in wondering what all the fuss is about: surely information is information? From the IT perspective however, each technology has evolved over the years, with little attention to the other, and the result is a divergent set of tools requiring complex interfaces or third party products to bridge between them.
A coupe of weeks ago, Oracle announced it was buying Stellent. The fact it has taken until 2006 for this to happen (and the same can be said for IBM, with FileNet), is indication enough that even the largest companies have only just "got" that organisations need a single source of information, whatever its underlying structure. While this may not be Oracle's first foray into unstructured data management (indeed, I believe it is its seventh), it is the company's first recognition that a purpose-designed content management system may offer additional facilities, beyond what can be supported from within the RDBMS. The issue has been brought into stark relief with the rapidly growing importance of email: today a purchase order may exist as a Word attachment to an email, or it may be a set of fields filled on a database form, but this is a purely technological distinction. To the sales operative, there should not be a distinguishable difference.
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