Re: EDI Stakeholder Perspective

Roger --

Your post of 2003-11-08:

> Here is draft text for an EDI Stakeholder's Perspective.  Note that 
> there are, as generally characterizes a stakeholder perspective, 
> elements drawn from multiple models.  I have tried to call these out 
> explicitly where possible.
> [... SNIP ...]

More than a month has passed without any comment on the list, and I 
wanted to comment that I think you hit a very important and slippery 
nail on the head with this post.

Supply chains typically require a level of lubrication with elbow 
grease far above that in application-to-application and most 
service-oriented scenarios, and that requirement increases with the 
number of participants.  The reason is that you can't exclude the small 
participants: Excel over facsimile, hand-entered EDI over modem, bisync 
modems carrying LU traffic from old SAP installations, etc.  In 
addition to duplicating protocol and encoding considerations, any 
proposed successor to EDI systems must provide a clean mechanism for a 
human to patch into a running ecosystem, locate events, back messages 
out of one process, decant them into another, etc. -- essentially what 
you're saying.

	-- Paul