A great shame

"... It is with great shame that we as an IT industry must acknowledge this embarrassing fact: it is easier for most organizations to find information on the Web than it is to find information in their own systems. Think about that for a moment. It is easier for them to locate data, through third parties, on a global information system than to do so within environments in which they have complete control and visibility. There are many reasons for this travesty, but the biggest problem is that we tend to use the wrong abstractions internally, overemphasizing our software and services and underemphasizing our data. This wrong-headed approach is a big part of why our business units are so perturbed with our IT departments. We forget that companies do not care about software except for the features and functionality it enables. What the business really wants are easier ways to manage the data they have collected, build upon it, and reuse it to support their customers and core functions... If someone in an organization wants to retrieve some

information, why can’t they just ask for it? And, once these questions have been answered

once, why do 10 (or 100 or 1,000) people asking the same question have to put the same

burden on the backend systems every time they issue the same query?" Brian Sletten