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Like the idea of having all your technology and infrastructure on a single platform, in a single box? Oracle thinks you will. But are they offering you the power without addressing the need for agility?
Want Enterprise IT In-a-Box?
Oracle is big. Increasingly, the name Oracle means big when it comes to almost every aspect of enterprise IT. Got lots and lots of content? Oracle ECM is big and can handle it. Got lots of people who set up teams, project groups and other collaborative communities of practice? WebCenter Suite is big and handles all that interaction. Got a large ERP, CRM or HRMS system for a giant multi-national organization? Oracle Exalogic is a big box that brings all those applications, content, collaboration and connectivity together. Want all those features, capabilities and capacity? Be prepared to pay big bucks.
The challenge is that while big enterprise-IT-in-a-box may seem like a compelling story at the top, it fails to elaborate on all the moving pieces, processes and cost-benefits that make up said big enterprise. CIOs are chartered to tool the organization while maintaining fiduciary responsibility. This means that enterprise IT systems must have an ability to justify their cost. Those justifications most often come from highly distributed and granular sets of business users. This is especially true where E2.0, content, collaboration and portal are concerned.
Defining the Business Case Won't Be Easy
So think about the business case for Oracle Exalogic — their new middleware machine that includes rack slots for ECM Suite, WebCenter Servers and large storage arrays for content. Let’s think through an example:
The fact that the marketing group in your organization would like better teaming tools to share digital assets for web and print campaigns will not, by itself, justify an Exalogic spend. Many times it is not enough to justify a platform upgrade. So that marketing group finds a sponsor in IT who outlines the thresholds for big IT spends. IT talks to the R&D group which acknowledges that they too would like better collaboration tools but they have 4 different product teams, 2 of whom use open source solutions, 1 uses SharePoint and 1 uses a old version of Oracle UCM but doesn’t like it.
So now Marketing and R&D are allies on the spend through a shared-services cost-justification. But now the cost of implementation for IT has just gone way up. Services are required in order to bring those 4 different R&D and 1 Marketing team on board. Furthermore, in order to be feasible, some kind of implementation and engagement template must be set up.
Everyone Does Not Have the Same Requirements
The problem is that Marketing and R&D do not at all work like each other. They have different back end systems integration needs. They have different usage paradigms. The engineers in the R&D group produce and consume data while the staff in the Marketing group produce and consume rich media. One group cares strongly about file locking and version control while one group cares strongly about the UX and whether or not the solution will work on Mac.
Collaboration, content creation, information consumption and engagement with systems is a highly individual process. Collaboration is rife with idiosyncrasies. Those idiosyncrasies have a funny way of turning into requirements. Solutions must be nimble, not just big in order to deal with those requirements. Information and systems agility, not just capacity, is vitally important to consider and calculate. The more users, the more idiosyncrasies, the more requirements, the higher the cost, the tougher the justification for a big spend.
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