Funny how this blogging stuff works. The minute you post something, soon after I usually find something similar or something that enhances or detracts from what I was writing about. Fortunately, this one may greatly enhance my post!
I talked about having an arsenal full of instrumentation, data and information collecting tools in yesterday’s posting YGE, NW? Part IV: Mapping Events to What’s Important and Your Message. I mentioned using the normal NMS/EMS/OSS/BSS tools, logfiles, scripts, database triggers and stored procedures, etc. to help collect metrics and KPI/KPM and turn them into events for processing upstream.
I came across another potentially useful approach that may make this instrumentation and collection process significantly easier in the future by using Really Simple Synidcation (RSS) to create a service bus (not ESB). Their goals is to accomplish what has been reserved in the past large companies with large IT staff and large IT budgets – easy integration and sharing of data between applications, services, etc.
The company, RSSBus, is in pre-release mode still and has a white paper available discussing their approach aimed at greatly simplifying integration, access and sharing of information.
I think this has great potential for enabling “the rest of us” to instrument the business and use that important data and information to create rich dashboards and portals and maybe even powerful BSM/BAM/BPM implementations. Imagine subscribing to dashboard feeds, business activity monitoring feeds, etc. Something like Pageflakes could become the enterprise BSM dashboard portal fed by numerous business, technology, people, process and operations feeds. Could this be the start to Web2.0 solutions in these areas?
Some highlights from the whitepaper:
“With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional programmers to use them.”
“What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the nonacronym-speaking crowd. If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most important consideration, please read on.”
“With RSSBus, our goal is to build general purpose software that connects or has the ability to easily connect to every system, data, or information source of any significance. Our core focus is to enable connectivity as simply and as easily as possible, and we believe our experience building networking software components and connectivity toolkits for the past decade, and the software assets we have created in the process, give us a unique advantage.”
I’m keeping these guys on my radar to see how their ideas and products develop. No indications as to availability, costs (open source?), etc. yet.