enterprise application

Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them)

March 5, 2009

One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. People want to know so they can design their system and so they can manage change. I recently got a request for a link to a post describing the difference and I realize that, though I have lots of posts [...]

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Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product

January 30, 2009

The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals had a post on a 21st Century Software Development Process that reminded me of one of my favorite topics – the need for programmers, especially Agile programmers, to get on…

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IBM and ILOG – Thoughts on Jerry Cuomo’s WebSphere Top 10

January 24, 2009

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!.

Business Mash-ups
Business Rules
Middleware-as-a-Service
Rainmaker
Extreme Scale
WAS.NEXT
Restful – Agile
DataPower-lution
POWERful Middleware
Industry-savvy Middleware

He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. Serveral of these – business mash=ups, business rules, Middleware-as-a-Service and Agile [...]

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Nice article on EDM

December 9, 2008

Joe McKendrick wrote a nice article on how EDM give companies a competitive edge for the Teradata Magazine this month. Joe did a nice job, as usual, of bringing out some key points and quoting me. My two favorite quotes were:
In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise applications [...]

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Oracle’s BI Strategy

December 2, 2008

Tobin Gilman of Oracle presented on Oracle’s BI Strategy. Oracle views Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence as coming together over time and has a single strategy. They see ERP and CRM as having enabling operational efficiencies by driving a process-centric view across silos. Clearly BPM has completed this transition. Yet management processes – reporting, [...]

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Live from BIWA Summit – Competing on Analytics

December 2, 2008

At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”.
Analytics are [...]

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First Look – ILOG and Relativity for legacy modernization

July 21, 2008

The folks at ILOG and Relativitiy recently announced a new integration between their products – Legacy IT Modernization enabled by ILOG and Relativity Technologies Business Rules Solutions. I got a chance to chat with them today about what was new and different in this latest attempt to bring legacy modernization and business rules together. Relativity’s [...]

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Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle

July 14, 2008

One of my regular readers had a question today about Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle – the EDMSDLC if you like. Here’s what he asked:
We do Business Rules in our approach… I guess one question would be, where does EDM fit in a typical SDLC? [company] does Requirements, we have a method [...]

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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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First (second really) Look – LucidEra Update

June 16, 2008

LucidEra is an on-demand analytics company that seems to be growing fast, not least due to its integration with Salesforce.com through Appexchange. They sell mostly to mid size businesses with some departments at larger organizations. They emphasize simplicity, focused analytic applications and leveraging the CRM platforms companies already have.
I blogged about their first product before [...]

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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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The power and challenges of decision management packages

June 8, 2008

David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]

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Making meals from your mainframe leftovers

May 28, 2008

When I read Ade McCormack’s book The IT Value Stack I was struck by many sections (as you can see from the review) and one thread in his narrative prompted this post. He recommends avoiding software development (because it is expensive and high risk). Ht talked about the importance of sweating the technology (making the [...]

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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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The Future of Enterprise Applications

May 20, 2008

I had to blog the last two sessions on paper – there are no power sockets in the hotel (the Palazzo at the Venetian in Las Vegas, conference planners please note) and my battery eventually gave up. So, back in the hotel now, here’s a summary of the notes I took.
Sharyn Leaver presented on the [...]

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Guest post over on the deal architect

May 13, 2008

I have read Vinnie Mirchandani’s blog “the deal architect” for a while now and thoroughly enjoyed many of his posts. When he asked me to write a guest post I jumped at the chance and today you can find “The Real Deal: James Taylor on Raising Your Enterprise Application IQ” on his blog. Vinnie’s blog [...]

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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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Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Reality Check with IDC

March 11, 2008

I dropped by the IDC Directions event today and saw two presentations. First up was Kathy Wilhide talking about Governance, Risk and Compliance or GRC as it is known. The GRC market has grown from a need for higher levels of confidence in financial and operational information. As compliance is not built into most existing [...]

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CIOs – use EDM to deliver what your business managers want

March 11, 2008

Frank Gens of IDC posted this short item on what Line of Business managers want from their CIOs and it had a nice little graph showing the key things that the business wants from IT. Of the 10 items, several seem to me to show the need for Enterprise Decision Management or EDM:

Speed up project [...]

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Today’s teenagers, tomorrow’s workforce

January 31, 2008

Two posts caught my eye last night – 5 questions a teenage kid might ask if starting work at your business today by Mike Sarokin on the EDS blog and Vinnie Mirchandarni’s follow up here. As the parent of a college student myself I had to chime in.
It seems to me that not only [...]

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