SOA

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first: Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers – now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

After lunch I joined the Insurance track and listened to Don Light of Celent (who wrote this nice paper some time ago) and Mike Gordon of Fair Isaac. Mike started and his first slide was headlined “survival of the fittest” which seems like the right headline! There is clearly a lot on in insurance these [...]

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 [...]

As I could not attend all of IMPACT 2008 and as there were hundreds of sessions, I thought I would post as complete a set of posts as I could (with help from Dan Zrobok), starting with mine: Blogging Live from IMPACT – Opening Keynotes Part I Live from IMPACT – Opening Keynotes Part II [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Sandy Carter kicks it off and introduced Craig Hayman of IBM. Smart SOA, he says, is fundamentally about loosely coupled services being integrated into scalable, reliable processes to tackle change. BPM enabled by SOA allows you to do this – embrace change while having a stable SOA foundation. This relies on the Model/Simulate, Rapidly Deploy/Change, [...]

Thanks to Dan I discovered a number of other bloggers covering IMPACT: Michael Cote (Redmonk) Dana Gardner Juris Kaža Bob Balfe James Governor Bill Newport A number of us are also twittering and you can find a summary of our impact 2008 posts here.

Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went [...]

Erik Klein from the WebSphere Commerce group at IBM and Scott Young from a consultant. Erik started by discussing the inhibitors to moving to multi-channel and customer-centric. These include: Siloed business units Applications that don’t integrate or support multi-channel operations Redundant data in multiple systems, no single version of the truth The different domains – [...]

It turns out they are going to move the schedule back to allow for the overrun in the keynotes so I have some time to catch up. So, Steve Mills. Steve re-iterated the power of business and IT alignment, again quoting the LSE / McKinsey study that shows such alignment doubles productivity (I am looking [...]

I am attending the IBM IMPACT show today and tomorrow and will try and blog live from the show. So far the wireless isn’t working in the keynote location (I am on my broadband wireless modem, thank you Verizon) and the room has no tables and no power for the HUGE number of laptop users [...]