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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Well I guess it had to happen - ILOG joined Fair Isaac in releasing a COBOL code generator for its flagship rules product. I have not yet seen it in action (I am sure I will at DIALOG next week) but I have talked with product management at ILOG and seen the public information. [...]

Last post in my series today - how to prioritize your use of EDM in a recession. As with any effort to prioritize EDM, the first thing to do is identify the decisions that make the difference. This means finding the micro decisions that are often hidden in your processes as well as correctly identifying [...]

This second to last post in the series is focused on the specific ability of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM to reduce fixed IT costs. This comes in two main “flavors” - using EDM to reduce maintenance costs through legacy modernization and using EDM to reduce the risks and costs of outsourcing. Both legacy modernization [...]

One of my favorite things to do on my blog is respond to questions from readers. To make it easy to find these going forward I have added a new category - Reader Questions. Email me (james at smartenoughsystems.com) if you have a question you’d like me to answer on the blog. Anyway, this week [...]