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 [...]

Dan Oneufer talked about the use of Intalio BPMS in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Justice Network has been established a long time and manages many aspects of the state justice system. However the counties are not well integrated into this network. Allegheny County, his example, is about 10% of the state and pretty rural. It has [...]

When I talk to folks about decision management they sometimes seem intimidated by the complexity of the problem and the sophistication of organizations that have invested heavily in the approach. Here, then, are some thoughts to help you get started.

Begin - even if the first version is not perfect or even close.
Automate the decision even [...]

David Greer had a cutely named post this week - The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications - it [...]

When I read Ade McCormack’s book The IT Value Stack I was struck by many sections (as you can see from the review) and one thread in his narrative prompted this post. He recommends avoiding software development (because it is expensive and high risk). Ht talked about the importance of sweating the technology (making the [...]

Colin Tuebner wrapped up with a session on BPM and change management. The presentation is based on a set of interviews with those customers using BPM a while and doing a good job at managing process change. The theme is “Organizations use different patterns for controlling change; choose yours and don’t let change manage you.” [...]

Mark Hennessy the CIO from IBM presented on his perspective on the changing role of the CIO. An IBM survey in 2005 found that of CEOs 80% thought IT had to be aligned to be successful but only 45% thought this was something they did well. More recent surveys showed CIOs feeling that this was [...]

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 [...]

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing - people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]