elnblog: Electronic Lab Notebooks

Loose coupling in the Enterprise…

Occasionally I meet people who feel that a single, all-encompassing ELN “product” purchased from one vendor and rolled out to everyone will somehow tie their organisation together. Rarely do these projects actually get to the rollout stage, and when they do the hoped-for benefits are rather hard to spot.

This entry by Simon Phipps explores the benefits of loose coupling in the enterprise:

the source of many costs in IT infrastructures result from different organisational units with no (or distant) shared management being forced to create technical interdependencies in order to co-operate. The less technology we are forced to share in order to co-operate, the less we will have to pay to get started and the less we will need to pay in the future to maintain - or remove - the ability. We need to stay loosely-coupled - connected by the least possible thread of technology.

The safest, cheapest, and most reliable way to joined-up research is loosely-coupled integration between various specialised systems. This is actually pretty easy to achieve (especially with open data formats and APIs) and empowers the customer organisation rather than leaving them at the whim of a vendor.

I don’t think the Enterprise has really woken up to DRM yet

DRM is beginning to make an entrance into the Enterprise, and whilst at one level the technologies sound attractive I’m not sure the longer term, deeper consequences are all that palatable. I do wonder what the lawyers will think (because a Judge is unlikely to be impressed by arbitrary restrictions imposed by some DRM system) and of course from a long term records perspective DRM is completely toxic.

James Governor’s MonkChips: digital lard for the enterprise: DRM meets document formats: “What I am saying is that DRM creates new escrow challenges, and organisations should know exactly what they are using it for, and why, and what risks they are mitigating, before embarking on an enterprise DRM strategy.”