Siebel Training, Day 2

Just completed Day 2 of Siebel Essentials. The more I learn it, the more I think Siebel has figured out a great way to break down the user facing complexity of typical Enterprise applications. The few UI constructs that users see, screen, view, applet, control, etc., cover all the user interface. It is a little boring but a great reduction of complexity on the other hand. I like their UI very much because of its effectiveness: I can get my jobs done very easily and quickly. There are almost no surprise as to how things actually work. I learned a lot from them.

What does Siebel have to do with us?

1. It's a great test bed of what UI features work well.
2. It validates our framework. If our framework can implement Siebel features in a straightforward manner, we've got scaleability (in terms of implementing complexity) nailed. Indeed, I already found some of the Siebel concepts correspond directly to the concept of implementation variant in Cornerstone. But ours is simpler and more powerful. So Siebel is on the high end to validate how far we can go with Cornerstone. On the opposite end, we want to make it dead simple for people to maintain, for example, a table (spreadsheet) of data. In the middle is the sweet spot, the thousands of components and modules that can be easily composed together to build a customer application, like the Siebel (or any other) apps broken down and built by millions of people on the web. This is the vision of world-wide composition, also known as the vision of AppWiki.
   

Why does this make sense? One angle is this: the entry barrier for Siebel type of applications is sky-high. No SMEs (small or medium sized enterprise) can get on their bandwagon easily. They don't need all the features either. Also it's very hard for them to switch later on or mix and match. The AppWiki vision says, don't implement the whole thing, but start from maintaining a list of contacts and grow that into an SFA application.

Can this be done? My belief is, it's possible if we start low and scale up gradually: We make people gravitate towards Confluence, and then better Confluence, and ever better Confluence. The users are not only users, but many of them will become developers because it's so easy to add new features and compose new services from other people's existing services. Before long this thing grows organically and there is no stopping of it. Just like how del.icio.us grew, how Flickr grew, how Technorati grew. We want to get into the business of rolling a snow ball that can sustain itself.

Dream off.