A colleague forwarded to me an interesting work by Petter Holmström titled “Ideas for Next Generation Process Authoring Tools”.  It’s a long comprehensive document, and I have just started reading it end-to-end. From a quick scan of the table of contents, abstract and conclusions, I mostly agree with his conclusions and recommendations:  

The tool vendors should shift focus and concentrate on making their tools more collaborative, customizable and scalable to different process sizes. In this thesis, some ideas of how this could be achieved have been presented, of which one of the more interesting ones is a wiki-based authoring tool.

 

As you may have realized from my previous blog postings, I am a strong proponent of collaborative process management tools and the importance of the involvement of developers and other process consumers in the creation of processes–they consume. The industry players and the user community should democratize process authoring and move on from blindly following methodology pundits.

Few days ago, I came across an old (May 1998) article by David Chappell, one my favorite technology writers/thinkers, titled “The Trouble With CORBA “. I could specially relate to his conclusion:

From the beginning, CORBA was never a true standard. Instead, the vendors who controlled the OMG process chose to create something that was more a marketing exercise than a complete technology. And ultimately, this is very sad. What could have been a crucially important industry standard has instead become just another marketing tool for selling proprietary products. The opportunity for a true standard, a TCP/IP for distributed objects, has been lost.

OMG and its supporters argue that given time, CORBA will become a true standard. It’s been seven years, and we’re still waiting. Why should we believe them now?

Believe it or not, this was exactly how OMG handled the development of Software Process Metamodel (SPEM). And once more missed the opportunity to create a true multi-vendor standard. It’s unfortunite that OMG has not changed over the years. I guess the fat cats never learn–or maybe the don’t want to learn.