Monday, April 05, 2004

Chimney Sweeps

The Next Job for the W3C "People will start to feel that when they access some data that they didn’t really think was relevant, they hadn’t thought was relevant to the problem at hand, and suddenly, their problem gets connected to some other things."

"To answer questions within a company, you’ve got to reach across boundaries. You’ve got stovepipes of information. You have HR information. You have totally separate information for bug reports and customer satisfaction.

You might have another, for example, for documentation. We find that we were tracking a customer’s problem, but most of those documents left the company, and when we left the company, we should have kept them. So let’s find out who else has written documents which are being used by people who are tracking bug reports for processing customers who have this problem.

At the moment, what we’re looking at for this is huge monster applications like the pre-Web, which are document databases. That didn’t work because everyone wanted to operate it a certain way. It’s much better to let each part of a company have a Web site, and they’re linked to each other. Let the financial folks organize things how they want, and let manufacturing control people organize their things how they want, and then merge them. Where they have things in common like people or times or places—they have to be able to connect them."

No comments: