Oddly, there is no mention of EAV scalability anywhere in the entirety of the report
My company competes indirectly with Workday, a highly popular HR software service vendor, so in reading Gartner’s assessment of Workday I had my hopes of getting the low-down on what many of us consider the fatal flaw in Workday’s architecture, namely the inherent scalability issues with its EAV-based data architecture. Oddly, there is no mention of EAV scalability anywhere in the entirety of the report.
Perhaps Gartner had a reason for omitting this. Maybe the author, Daniel Sholler, an expert in service-oriented architectures, had an audience of smaller organizations in mind for whom scalability was not a concern and for whom the convenience of a hosted application with a flexible API was paramount. Nevertheless, the omission is at odds with the many paragraphs Sholler devotes to benefits directly related to the unmentioned EAV.
So what gives? A simple oversight? A pro-Workday bias?
I don’t know, but I don’t trust advisory firms. Never have regardless of which side of the big IT fence I sat on. And when otherwise great writers on HR like Naomi Bloom and Dennis Howlett parrot advisory findings uncritically as they did in this recent thread on LinkedIn’s HR Technology group, then the misconceptions proliferate.
I’m not alone in this distrust of advisory firms. They have always found themselves accused of bias, and Gartner gets its fair share of those criticisms. Unfortunately, their analysts incorrectly perceive the charges as an attack on their personal integrity.
Instead, I accuse them of systematic bias emanating from the simple fact that advisory firms derive a large percentage of income directly from the very vendors they purport to objectively evaluate.
It’s the age old problem of quis custodiet ipsos custodis, who guards the guards
It’s the age old problem of quis custodiet ipsos custodis – who guards the guards?
And yes, that is my unbiased (cough) assessment.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Nicely put! It boils down to just that “quis custodiet ipsos custodis, who guards the guards”, in this case I think the critics guard the guards.
I see the opportunity for competitors to fill that gap of scalability by sharing a solution that is actually scalable – after all, most smart readers would read the assessment and then read the critics’ rebuttal in order to get to the “real” assessment.
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Hi Drew…yes it does get circular fast – who will then critique the critic? Chicken and the egg problem.
The Munchausen Trilemma paraphrased: it’s impossible to properly asses anything in the field of software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_Trilemma
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