Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information - e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Last session of the day (also blogged on paper) was Charles Brett on Why Events Matter To The Business and what this means for application development professionals. I heard Charles talk on a similar subject at the IBM IMPACT event -Live from IMPACT - Business Event Processing.
While many more business and IT people are [...]

Mike made an interesting comment in response to my recent post on the future of application development. He said:
Are business domain tools necessary to enable a non-trivial development role for businesspeople?
Like many good questions the answer is complicated - in a way, both yes and no. I do agree with Mike that a non-trivial role [...]

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 [...]

I was reading Johan den Haan’s really good article on Model Driven Engineering or MDE today and a particular comment caught my eye:
MDE aims to increase the return a company derives from its software development effort.
He went on to quote Atkinson & Kühne for two ways to do this:

By improving the short-term productivity of [...]

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 [...]

I got an interesting email from Dan Appleton this week. Dan is a principal of The Capabilities Center and his email prompted me to blog today on this topic. Dan’s email introduced his perspective on how business rules, especially in the context of enterprise decision management or EDM. He and I are broadly in agreement [...]

An interesting post caught my eye recently - Should we still call it Application Development? This seems like an interesting question, particularly when you start considering the decomposition of the application that has taken place over the last decade. Not so long ago, applications (especially enterprise applications) were monolithic. They handled their own data, user [...]