An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times - How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:
Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to [...]

I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]

An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]

Chris Berg wrote a nice piece on Pressure Points that seemed like it was worth highlighting. Chris outlines some great reasons for using business rules and he seems to Believe in business rules (as I do).

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.

Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users
Involve users in quality assurance processes
Don’t use traditional [...]

I have often posted on the need to combine decision management and process management but it seemed to me that recently I have seen more BPM writers talking about this. For instance the folks over on the ARIS blog posted BPM + BRM = Greater than the Sum of the Parts (talking about a webinar [...]

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]