ESME Blog

ESME got a nice mention in Mark Yolton’s (Senior Vice President of the SAP Community Network ) keynote at “Open Source Meets Business” (OSMB) conference. Take a look at Mark’s blog about his presentation (slides are here). The slides are interesting, because they describe the changing relationship between open- and closed-source software. This discussion is obviously relevant to the manner in which ESME evolves.

Whenver arriving at an event, the first thing I check out is the location of the nearest Apple Store. Yes I know – boys toys and all that.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find that the Palazzo where I’m staying is just over a quarter mile down the road. SWEEEEET! I don’t know if SAP had this in mind but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Despite a pretty packed schedule, I”m hoping to find time to get there. Maybe show them ESME? I wonder how many of my colleagues will be in there at some stage or another?

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Details of Apple Las Vegas store.

PS – for some reason WP didn’t want to embed the map so I swiped the image instead.

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This from Thomas Vander Wal , the person who coined the term ‘folksonomies’ gives credence to the general ideas behind ESME:

As has always been the case large enterprise systems are worked around through the use of smaller and more nimble solutions that augment the existing tools. Even in Dan’s [Rosenberg, SAP] incredible demo I saw gaps for these tools. The quick tools that can fill these gaps are blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, Twitter type sharing, Veodia type video sharing, instant messaging, etc. There are many avenues to quickly capture information and understanding and share it. These tools get out of the way and allow what is in someone’s head to get digitized and later structured by the individual themselves or other people whom have had the information shared with them in a community space. This turns into flows through streams that can be put into many contexts and needs as well as reused as needed.

The key to making these tools truly useful comes in the integrations that can be offered. It’s not enough that such tools have a purpose, they need embedding into the processes people are engaged in so that the all important traceability and auditability can be applied.

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Mike Gotta is one of the fiercest yet knowledgeable analysts around all things 2.0. Here’s what he had to say regarding ‘presence’, a key component in the ESME story:

Larger vendors such as IBM would have to break from its UC-centric thinking around presence as would Microsoft. For Microsoft however this type of move is almost unimaginable given the centricity of OCS around SIP/SIMPLE and Microsoft’s reluctance to integrate and interoperate with other vendors on a level playing field when it comes to presence. Oracle remains a dark horse as does SAP, although ESME is a nice start (congrats BTW to the people involved in ESME and to Dennis Howlett who seems to be the proud mother at the moment).

BTW – blushing wildly at last statement. Never seen myself as ‘mother’ before.

Any project leader will tell you that team selection is vital to success. Mixing the right skills, motivation and personalities requires a careful assessment of the people to include and the roles they might take. Not on ESME.

This is a self-selecting group of people, loosely tied by the SAP Community. Each person who has contributed chose to get involved and commit time to a project that presents special challenges. A recipe for disaster, especially when some members didn’t know each other before ESME kicked off. In my case I’ve only met one of the team in the real world. But no.

As this story explains, in the right circumstances and conditions, it is perfectly possible to assemble a working unit that is able to deliver. Key ingredients:

I sense that if the community is large enough, you’ll always find groups who are willing to push the boundaries of innovation and invention. The fact SDN and Twitter have brought this group together in a discoverable context is more than serendipitous, more than coincidental. It is more than vaguely knowing, learning to trust and having a deeply felt mutual respect for one another. It is because the community exists for EVERYONE’s common good and provides the environment for EVERYONE to get something positive out of their involvement.

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