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 [...]

I recently past 10 years as a US citizen and, as a result, was returning from Europe with a new passport. To celebrate this occaision the INS decided to put me through a manual check - apparently my name matched someone on the watch list. Now it should be noted that nothing else did - [...]

An old colleague of mine, Vaughn Merlin, had a really interesting post this week When Strategy Becomes Continuous. It’s a great post and he makes three key points:

IT strategy is not the point - it’s all about business strategy.
Much ’strategy’ effort is not very strategic.
Strategy formulation and execution are too loosely coupled.

He then quotes [...]

The folks from Cordys presented their view of the new business operations platform. Current systems development is in the context of four key game-changing trends:

Consumerization
Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet
Commoditization
Virtualization
Not just of hardware but of processes and teams
Globalization

In this environment, processes are a key competitive advantage - much [...]

Thomas Erl presented on the Architecture of Service-Orientation to start the breakout sessions and build on his opening comments. The key challenge is that of the endless IT progress cycle - the business continually needs more and different support from IT to deal with changes to business models while IT has new and changing capabilities [...]

Patrick Joseph Gauthier wrote a great post this week called “Business Process Reengineering: The Right Skills And Roles For The Task Will Save You Money” and I loved the question he suggests (that gave me the title for this post):
“what if someone with a lower pay grade were to do this?”
He goes on to make me [...]

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 [...]

A reader had an interesting question this week. As a comment to Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance he asked “What makes a company ready?”. I suspect my closing line “The products are, mostly, ready. Whether companies are is another question…” prompted this.
So, what makes a company ready for enterprise decision management - [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]