Why do you CRIMP?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 25, 2011 at 06:13 AM

In the enterprise world, the success of SAP as an Enterprise Resource Platform is due to the fact that—more than a software tool- SAP is a proven system of organising and monitoring operations. Huge investment has gone into developing that system, and SAP will work diligently to adjust it to any new customer.

In the personal information management world, such investments have been mostly fragmented. Rather than focusing on the knowledge worker, most money has gone into a ‘consumer’ approach, which usually aims for the lowest common denominator; as a result, the greatest success story is one of a toolbox (MS Office) whose applications are so basic they can be used for mostly anything, without really providing any kind of breakthrough. To get a perspective, a ruler might be useful whether you are designing a house or a skyscraper, but the complexity of the latter calls for tools that work at another level. A skyscraper is not designed one floor at a time, even though eventually the plans for every floor will be drawn out.

With SAP and the likes now recognising the potential of the SMB (Small and Medium Business) market, including SOHO business, I have hopes for the future. My only concern is whether they will at least consider the virtues of some of the best tools we talk about in this forum, as a starting point, or whether they will start from their own enterprise viewpoint and work their way down…

jimspoon wrote:
>I’m realizing that that the search for the ideal PIM software is really
>subordinate to the search for the ideal method of processing information. (Of course
>better tools make new methods possible, and can lead us to those new methods.)
[...clip…]
>It frustrates me that I have had so much difficulty in grasping how I can best assemble
>and unify my information that is scattered about in so many different databases that
>don’t easily work with one another.