Re: Enterprise Modeling, Document Control/Management, and Groupware

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

Crystol

> 1. Conceptually, how do/should enterprise modeling solutions (product
> e.g. Popkin's System Architect), groupware solutions (e.g. Lotus Notes),
> and document management systems (e.g. MS Visual SourceSafe) work
> together? Does the implementation of one or the other make one or the
> other redundant (huh?).

I saw this question the first time you posted it, and hoped someone else would
help out.  let me give you some of our experience.

Among other things, we do ERP consulting.  Our bottom line is that technological
solutions should solve the needs of people, not that people should make what
they do fit the technological solutions available on the market.  To that end,
we tend to recommend patchwork solutions, generally drawing on the best-of-breed
solutions in various parts of the overall solution, rather than picking one
vendor and putting up with their idiosyncracies.  Example: we knitted together
one company's solution using parts from Scopus (now Siebel), Oracle, Sun,
Peoplesoft, and others; our competitors said Just Use SAP. (Of course, it helped
that our solution would have come in at $6.8M and 15 months, vs. the SAP
solution costing $14M and taking 2.5 years at best.)

How should solutions from various vendors work together?  Ideally, seamlessly.
In fact, that's been our goal in putting together solutions.  In fact, it's hard
to get data from one program into a form that another program can see.  Our
default is to get data into the most commonly used formats, one that can be read
and used by the various components.  Which, of course, can be really difficult
with Lotus Notes. And sometimes with Microsoft products.

We've used various modeling programs, and still prefer ones that are simple to
understand and use, that have a minimum of program-specific formats or
extensions, and above all produce reports or pictures that anybody can
understand.

> 2. Should I just forget about all of this and concentrate on finding a
> suitable document management system?

No, because the output of your document management system will be sets of files
that others in your company will have to use.  If you can get your IS department
gurus to do a little forward planning and concentrate on how to best make
information accessible to everyone, you'll probably come up with some general
guidelines (e.g., 'it has to be able to be used in a TCP/IP environment; it has
to be translatable into MS Word,' etc.)  What two of our client companies have
done to help with this is to standardize on MS Office and Netscape; this
dictates that any solution has to produce files MS Word can read (although the
solution can also produce other formats as well) and be something that Netscape
can move.

Hope this helps.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems


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