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 [...]

Interesting session on the Mortgage Crisis next, subtitled “Implications for a Global Economy”. Joe Breeden of Strategic Analytics and Daniel Melo of Fair Isaac. Joe started by saying that this is the 3rd time this has happened in the last 16 years. And, as before, it’s not just about mortgage and it’s not just about [...]

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

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 [...]

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 is?
How [...]

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 [...]

I am often asked the question in the title - what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it:

Operational
While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful.
Real-Time
As a result we talk [...]

The nice folks on the Drools blog pointed me to an article today called Implement business logic with the Drools rules engine. This article was written by Ricardo Olivieri of IBM. Richard does a nice job of walking through both the basic case for using a business rules engine (BRE). I feel compelled to make [...]

I recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he gives you fair warning of this right up front [...]

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 [...]