Enterprisey vs. Getting it Done
James McGovern throws the gauntlet down to the Ruby crowd again, challenging them to get something published:
Folks reading this blog entry need to consider adding him to their blogroll... Awhile back I threw out the challenge to the Ruby community that if within thirty days, they could get a single Fortune 100 enterprise whose primary business isn't technology to tell a story in a public forum (conference or magazine) about how they used Ruby to develop an enterprise application (aka system of record) that I would make a sizable donation to a mutually agreed upon charity. I still have my money in my pocket.
He repeats the challenge further down in his post. The thing is, non-technology companies have no real motivation to do that. If problems are being solved, they tend not to care how it was done - at least in the corporate marketing and executive suites. In the standards/architect groups, and in IT groups, on the other hand, they tend to be overly concerned with following the herd, due to the perceived safety - see my post earlier on that.
The people who most need to wonder about potentially better ways of doing things are the architects and IT managers. Asking for case studies - which will have to flow from the Marketing group - isn't going to move the ball forward.
Comments
Stereotyping is evil...
[] June 30, 2006 6:11:36.499
Many large enterprises openly talk about their architectures. For example, I have written in the past for several major magazines and have articles coming out in the future as well. Likewise, we have also had multiple industry analysts come in and do case studies on our architecture, process and pretty much anything else. All of this is publicly available.
The community needs to stop stereotyping, work on getting published and start having open dialogs...
Too late
[Troy Brumley] June 30, 2006 7:05:13.420
To the anonymous commentor: By the time that stuff comes into being, the Ruby and Rails crowd will have moved on to an even better technology. I don't think producing linear yards of published stuff on the bookshelf is a sign of health, rather a sign that a technology has been around long enough to attract camp followers.
While I bemoan the quality of publishing of computer books today, I do have to agree with the people who point me to blogs and online communities--that's where the real action and information are. And, there's enough interest to keep those people working, communicating, and building a community without a pile of me-too books.
Sadly, it's that sort of shelf presence that gets the attention of non-technical enterprises.