Posts tagged as:

Business Agility

Are programmers the problem?

June 23, 2008

There was more discussion in the blogosphere about the James McGovern COBOL is Evil post – COBOL is not evil, but COBOL programmers are. Now I already posted a response to James’ post (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful – not Java) but this new post made me think. I should say that [...]

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Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)

June 13, 2008

Joe McKendrick in his Eye on the Enterprise blog had a post on legacy modernization – Time to Cut COBOL from Life Support in which he referenced a post by James McGovern The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is… in which James says
that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with [...]

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When is a cockpit not a cockpit?

May 30, 2008

When it’s a dashboard.
I often hear people talk about fighter pilots as a model for the future of business users. For instance, Ade McCormack did in his book on the IT value stack. Indeed this is such a good mental image that many companies use it – either to promote their products or to talk [...]

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Come to the Intalio User Conference and get the book for free!

May 29, 2008

Neil and I are going to be speaking (on Applying Decision Management to Make Processes Smarter, Simpler and More Agile) at the Intalio User Conference on June 17th and the nice folks at Intalio have decided that everyone who attends deserves a copy of the book. While I am sure that all the attendees are [...]

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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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Automating Decisions within Business Processes

May 21, 2008

I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes.
The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. If [...]

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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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Age of Dynamic Business Applications

May 21, 2008

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing – people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]

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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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Some thoughts on the future of application development

May 8, 2008

Mike Gualtieri of Forrester had a blog post a few months back that I missed then but that he pointed out to me this week – What Is Your Future? In it he outlines two scenarios at either end of a continuum. One is that application development changes in incremental ways such that “The application [...]

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Live from InterACT – The Mortgage Crisis

April 29, 2008

Interesting session on the Mortgage Crisis next, subtitled “Implications for a Global Economy”. Joe Breeden of Strategic Analytics and Daniel Melo of Fair Isaac. Joe started by saying that this is the 3rd time this has happened in the last 16 years. And, as before, it’s not just about mortgage and it’s not just about [...]

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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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Live from InterACT – Using Risk Applications to Drive Growth

April 28, 2008

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

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Live from InterACT – Building a Decision Engine

April 28, 2008

Next up was Chris Collard of Dell talking about building a decision engine. Chris had done an implementation at Dell Financial Services and was sharing some of his experience with replicating that at Dell. Chris talks about decision engines as full decomposed applications – data, process and logic all externalized. Chris’ central thesis is
Effective Decision [...]

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Scope <> Business Rules

April 24, 2008

Jeff Jonas wrote an interesting post – Custom Software Scope Changes (Not) – that reminded me of my ongoing battle to argue that rules are not requirements. Jeff argues that we take far too little time designing custom software before we start to build it. A summary quote from his post illustrates his point:
I am [...]

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First Look – InRule Technology

April 21, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]

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After EDM – the future of business

April 11, 2008

The second part of my response to Dave Wright’s comment is about the kind of business one can run after one adopts EDM. To do this, let’s predicate the discussion a company that has adopted Enterprise Decision Management as a core management principle, implemented the technology and development approaches that support it and had long [...]

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Live from IMPACT – End to End Process Visibility

April 8, 2008

Last session for me today, indeed the last session before I go home, is Janelle Hill of Gartner and Kramer Reeves of IBM on improving agility through end-to-end process agility. Janelle went first sharing Gartner’s BPM Scenario for the next five years. She had two initial points:

In 2013, do you know where your work is?
How [...]

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Live from IMPACT – Business Event Processing

April 8, 2008

Ed Lynch, from the AptSoft acquisition, was on next for me talking about using Business Event Processing for an agile business response. This was interesting given IBM’s recent announcements on business event processing.
Charles Brett from Forrester began with an overview of Event Processing. Charles, like many, assumed that event processing was a narrowly focused approach [...]

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Live from IMPACT – Customer Panel on Driving Alignment

April 8, 2008

After the keynote it is back to the other end of the MGM Grand to attend a customer panel on business/IT alignment. Amy Wohl is the host and she blogs here. BTW I may not finish the whole session as I have to go sign the book at the bookstore at the show. I am [...]

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