RE: [emergency] FW: [legalxml-intjustice] GJXDM subset schema exa mple and documen tation

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

A typical adoption will be something like, this early:

o  Must use XML for all external interfaces 

which is a very weak requirement.  Then later:

o  Must implement CAP (version) for alerting to (cite receivers) 

or something like that, which is specific and a strong 
requirement.  Ideally, by the time that strong requirement 
appears, a studious sharp vendor has done their homework 
and is within a year of fielding the features to support 
a requirement.  Keep in mind, a single requirement can 
spawn multiple tasks and implementations in a single product.

If you read RFPs, after awhile you discover that they are seldom 
written by the procurement organization, but by a consulting firm 
such as Gartner. There are some points of interest:

1.  Some consulting firms analyse the organization's data and 
business rules and produce a tight specification based on the 
current organization.   These are actually bad RFPs.  They create 
many exceptions and a one-off custom product.

2.  Some consulting firms have a boilerplate RFP consisting of 
the most common requirements they have discerned over some 
number of procurements.   These are better because like a 
standard, they represent accumulated knowledge over a domain.

The problem either of these have is that they may not follow 
the price domains, sometimes called 'market tiers'.  These means 
the procurement is specifying a system which a given customer 
cannot afford to buy and the vendor cannot afford to build at 
that price point.  If the evaluation group is doing a naive 
evaluation, say just counting nos and yeses, they may reject a 
bid that is actually closest to their price point and buy a 
system that cannot be delivered.  The typical result is they 
lose the money invested and have to do it all again.

As is easy to observe, this process affects commodization and 
thus, standardization.  Over time, tiers tend to collapse downward 
and thus, smaller vendors with the right products at the right 
time can gain in market share by taking it from established 
vendors.

Listening is everything.  Timing is everything else.

len


From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com


To be honest, I doubt we could settle this notion of adoption uptake 
in RFPs here.