A VC friend of mine who focuses on the consumer space recently quipped that the word “repository” means “proprietary” to him. To a certain extent he’s correct in that the back-end data models of repositories are always unique by vendor, but a repository might be a necessary evil in the enterprise. Without repositories, user-behavior can be left completely unchecked. Yeah, I know —- one can setup security here and there, but that requires a human to do something and security is not all encompassing. Let’s face it: most users have complete disregard for corporate assets — they could care less.
User-behavior in regards to applications in the enterprise can be a double-edged sword. Every developer of enterprise software applications is worried about user-experience. An application that requires drastic alteration of the usual point-an-click semantics of a Microsoft Office application can be quickly relegated to the “it’s too hard to use” pile, rendering the application and the investment dead weight.
Without managing (and mandating) user-behavior in the enterprise with a repository, a process is all but completely shot. Forget about requiring users to follow procedures when they depend solely on generic tools like Windows explorer, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Word without repositories on the back-end to enforce business rules.
As an example, how do you force a user to perform version control for all modified Word documents so that you can see the delta between all the revisions? Without a repository, you can only hope that a user follows unenforceable rules regarding file naming conventions when they save newly modified files in a directory tree somewhere. Oh, and good luck forcing them to save things in the right directory.
Vendors who try to sell you on “we don’t alter user behavior” are really saying, “you can continue to let the users do whatever they want.” Repositories are a necessary evil indeed.
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