Tim Bass
11-17-2008 07:30 AM
The
CEP Users Group I started on LinkedIn now has nearly 700 members.* This group was created to be a users group, not a vendor product marketing group or a group for headhunters to post their job searches.** For that reason, and to keep the group from future marketing spam, to be fair to all, and to avoid endless controversy over trivial discussions, this group now has a set of posting guidelines.
In early 2009 we will call to form a “users council” to advise the posting guidelines and expand the group moderators.** This council, or committee, will be composed of users and independent advisors across numerous vertical and horizontal sectors, including (for example) network management, security management, defense,* financial services, science, research, and transportation.
I sincerely apologize to any recruiter, seller or headhunter who may feel unhappy with these guidelines; however, we do not want the group on LinkedIn to become another marketing and positioning battleground.* We have enough of these battlegrounds, forums and blogs on the Internet, so we do not need to turn a professional network, LinkedIn, into another “who can out-position and out-blog link the other” network. This group was created for users, which means end users, independent consultants, analysts and solution providers to end users.* The group was not created nor intended to be a sales or marketing channel for sellers.
Guidelines for Posting in the CEP Users Group on LinkedIn
Please:
(1) No posts from headhunters or recruiters. These posts will be deleted and repeated violations will be grounds for removal from the group.
(2) No self-promoting posts from software vendors (to their software products or their links promoting their software products). This group is not for software marketing. These posts will be deleted and repeated violations will be grounds for removal from the group.
(3) The purpose of the LinkedIn group is to serve the User community, not the vendor community. For this reason, vendors that do not adhere to the guidelines may removed if deemed an abuser of user group privileges.
(4) Vendors or users who have questions or issues about these guidelines should contact the group manager(s) directly via email or by phone.
(5) There are ample other channels on the Internet (blogs, forums, wikis and more) for vendor marketing on CEP related topics. These guidelines are for the benefit of all; and also subject to change over time.
Thank you.
In addition, the group on LinkedIn is not a place to rehash the endless, and for the most part useless, “three letter acronym” (TLA) debates that arise and fall from time-to-time.** I agree with my colleagues that there may be folks who have never seen these debates, but then again, the debates are easy to find using Google search.
Frankly speaking, I have worked in senior IT strategy, implementation and architecture for over 20 years, and I have never worked in an organization where experienced folks debated about the use of terms, EDA, SOA, CEP, BPM, BI, ETC.* TLAs and alphabet soup discussions are great for analysts and marketeers looking to position their products and build their magical data sheets, but these timeless debates have almost nothing to do with solving real, operational business problems.* Folks solve operational problems with people, systems and code not TLAs.
This is precisely why, by the way, when a technology discussion is dominated by folks “selling” versus folks “buying” , the conversation generally degenerates to endless positioning chatter that serves little constructive purpose. These debates relating to CEP/EP have come and gone, repeatedly, over the past three years, and nothing has changed.* We need to hear from the buyers and users (
Marc Adler of Citigroup comes to mind here), not the sellers.
If you are a CEP/EP vendor and your customer has a fantastic public use case for your CEP/EP product, please encourage your customer, the user, to share and post the information to other users.
Source...
