breadth first as an obstacle for technology investment?

An interesting post from Adam Deane, about "intelligent BPM",  claiming that the obstacle for getting more intelligent software (in that case in the BPM domain) is the fact that vendors are focused on breadth and not depth, meaning providing products with simple (and shallow) capabilities, and focus on selling these products to as many customers, rather than working on providing "deeper" products and work with existing customers to improve the utilization of their products in more mature way.   I guess that the accounting-based management of enterprises today contribute a lot to this approach,     This observation is not restricted to BPM only,  I think it applies to many areas --- maybe even in event processing?  

On specialized graduate degree programs

Recently I came across several specialized programs, one of them is the master degree in De Paul university entitled "Master of Science in Predictive Analytics" that is sponsored by IBM; the other is a planned transatlantic master degree in collaboration between three European universities and three Canadians universities to pursue a collaborative program around BPM, in which event processing is one of the components. There are people who are strong supporters of specialized degrees, and there are also some opponents. Somewhere in the 1990-ies, I have been a member in a committee of the Israeli Higher Education Council, whose role has been to evaluate a new department (and degree programs) in one of the Israeli universities called "communication systems engineering", at that time this program has been controversial, the supporters claimed that it is the best education to a much needed profession, while the opponents claimed that it will create engineers with two narrow focus, and in general an engineer need to be more broad minded. At the end we recommended to approve this program, and it still exists, however, in some of the more conservative universities, it could not have happened.

Nowadays we have some tension between depth and breadth, and I guess that this is more of person own inclination where does the person classifies him/herself on the breadth vs. depth axis. The answer is not black and white, some roles are better occupied by people with depth and deep expertise, some roles are better occupied by people with very broad professional education. Of course, there are people who succeed to have both. Personally I prefer persons that are very good at something over persons that are mediocre in everything, moreover, one of the common mistakes of enterprises in employees development is to try and strengthen areas in which the employee is weak, in many cases, it is more effective to strengthen areas in which the employee is already strong, to challenge the employee to achieve excellence (unless the weakness is in a fundamental area that is critical for the employee's success).

Anyway, each of these programs will have to find its focus to create expertise in order to succeed.