elnblog.com

Occasionally I meet people who feel that a single, all-encompassing ELN “product” purchased from one vendor and rolled out to everyone will somehow tie their organisation together. Rarely do these projects actually get to the rollout stage, and when they do the hoped-for benefits are rather hard to spot.

This entry by Simon Phipps explores the benefits of loose coupling in the enterprise:

the source of many costs in IT infrastructures result from different organisational units with no (or distant) shared management being forced to create technical interdependencies in order to co-operate. The less technology we are forced to share in order to co-operate, the less we will have to pay to get started and the less we will need to pay in the future to maintain – or remove – the ability. We need to stay loosely-coupled – connected by the least possible thread of technology.

The safest, cheapest, and most reliable way to joined-up research is loosely-coupled integration between various specialised systems. This is actually pretty easy to achieve (especially with open data formats and APIs) and empowers the customer organisation rather than leaving them at the whim of a vendor.