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 Decision [...]

First session today was some folks from Allstate Financial talking about the Impact of Service Oriented Architecture on Data Modeling: A Case Study. AllState Financial has the large number of data sources typical of a large corporation. Each line of business has its own administrative systems and mergers and acquisitions also create new data sources. [...]

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst:
No such thing as a business surprise - there is always a warning in advance
but were you listening - did you collect data about it, analyze [...]

Neil and I are attending the DAMA conference this week and I will be blogging from some sessions. First one (after a fairly long set of announcements) is the Tuesday morning keynote, Michael Blechar of Gartner on The Yin & Yang of Process and Data: Which Will Be King of the Next Generation of Applications? [...]

Next up was a panel of experts - Sandy Carter of IBM, Judith Hurwitz of Hurwitz & Associates, Richard Soley of OMG - moderated by Brenda Michelson. This will apparently be available as a podcast some time soon. Brenda asked each person to identify the areas of most concern to CIOs. Here’s what they had [...]