I read with great interest an article from eWeek, authored by Pringo's Majid Abai, entitled "How Enterprise Information Portals and Social Networking Are Converging." I think Majid is right on the money, and his comments are quite close to zAgile's vision.
In the past, I recognized how zAgile's vision matches up well with emerging trends including: Unified Collaboration, information sharing, semantic discovery, social networking, contextual computing, and the surge in mash-ups.
The thing that intrigues me is that it seems that not many people are putting together the critical idea, that comprehensive, contextual, enterprise collaboration requires a mastery of data and more specifically, that's about semantic data. Certainly SOA / web services are great for connecting data from point A to point B, but if every time you must define all the meta data characteristics of A & B and how they are related, you waste a lot of time, you will get inconsistencies, and you still won't be able to infer meaning with respect to A & B concepts, let alone how they relate to C.
This is why ontology-driven solutions for any kind of enterprise collaboration will become so obviously critical in the coming couple years. The point-to-point hacks will no longer be enough. What is required is an enterprise, contextual, structured foundation, which semantically plugs together all collobartion tools, social networking tools, engineering tools, CRM, and other applications. Ideally, the solution should use semantic web standards and be open source with an open source ecosystem of stanadardized connectors. This is what zAgile delivers.
Great little article!
Posted by: socialnetworking | May 06, 2009 at 10:47 AM