Posts tagged as:

agile

Mr Obama, smarten these systems!

January 20, 2009

Like millions of my fellow Americans I listened to our new President today. As I did I was struck by the opportunities for decision management to deliver the smarter systems that will be critical with some of the priorities President Obama laid out in his speech. There were four commitments he made that struck me [...]

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Check out this new technology article portal

January 16, 2009

I have been working with some folks in the NE who have launched a new technology article portal – e-technologymanagement.com.This has a number of focus areas, notably SOA, Agile and Decision Management (in which I am involved, obviously). The portal is just getting started so check it out and subscribe to the feed. You can [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…

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EDM Summit – some closing thoughts

November 3, 2008

I thought I would wrap up with some closing thoughts for the week:

Lots of discussion of the importance of data – understanding it, integrating it, cleaning it and making the same data available to those reporting on it, doing analytics with it and running operational systems.
Interesting times in the rules market with recent acquisitions by [...]

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Here’s how decision management delivers continuous strategy

October 14, 2008

An old colleague of mine, Vaughn Merlin, had a really interesting post this week When Strategy Becomes Continuous. It’s a great post and he makes three key points:

IT strategy is not the point – it’s all about business strategy.
Much ’strategy’ effort is not very strategic.
Strategy formulation and execution are too loosely coupled.

He then quotes [...]

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The Architecture of Service-Orientation

October 7, 2008

Thomas Erl presented on the Architecture of Service-Orientation to start the breakout sessions and build on his opening comments. The key challenge is that of the endless IT progress cycle – the business continually needs more and different support from IT to deal with changes to business models while IT has new and changing capabilities [...]

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A reader asks… about development, business rules and model-driven development

August 4, 2008

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

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Application Development 2.0

July 30, 2008

Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.

Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users
Involve users in quality assurance processes
Don’t use traditional [...]

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First Look – OutSystems Agile Platform

June 27, 2008

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

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Business Process – Linking Business and IT

June 18, 2008

Janelle Hill of Gartner kicked off day 2. Business Process Management is the current approach to being process-centric and part of a long history stretching back to Taylor/Deming, Business Process Reengineering and more. In particular it is an evolution from computerized process flow, to packaged applications as best practices and now flexible and adaptive processes. [...]

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Change management in the real world using BPM

May 23, 2008

Colin Tuebner wrapped up with a session on BPM and change management. The presentation is based on a set of interviews with those customers using BPM a while and doing a good job at managing process change. The theme is “Organizations use different patterns for controlling change; choose yours and don’t let change manage you.” [...]

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The Future of Application Development

May 21, 2008

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

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Dynamic Business Applications

May 21, 2008

Connie Moore and John Rymer kicked off today talking about Dynamic Business Applications and their first discussion was around brown paper bags. They made the point that brown paper bags are a pure commodity and all you can do is reduce costs. Other kinds of bags offer more opportunities for innovation and, thus, more margins. [...]

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Live from InterACT – Design for People, Build for Change

April 29, 2008

Back on this blog for John Rymer of Forrester talking about dynamic business applications (about which I have blogged before) and how the next generation of systems will be designed for people and built for change. John began by showing a video of a broker’s desktop demonstration built by Adobe and some partners. Brokers are [...]

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What IS a smart (enough) system anyway?

March 27, 2008

I am often asked the question in the title – what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it:

Operational
While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful.
Real-Time
As a result we talk [...]

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SOA and BPM with IDC

March 11, 2008

Second session at IDC Directions today and I am listening to Maureen Fleming and Sandy Rogers talking about SOA and BPM. IDC takes the position that this is about a need for agile systems and that BPM and SOA are part of how organizations can address this need. Of course, having just come from a [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Best Practices in Agile Business Rules Development

February 24, 2008

Next up was Jerome Boyer presenting the Agile Business Rules Development Methodology, an approach ILOG makes available based on agile methodologies. The methodology has four tracks – Business Process, Data, Business Rules and Architecture. The balance between them varies and all four are built in iterations. ILOG has developed a methodology based on the Rational [...]

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Book Review – The Long Tail

November 26, 2006

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes”. In this world the [...]

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