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 [...]

Connie Moore and John Rymer kicked off today talking about Dynamic Business Applications and their first discussion was around brown paper bags. They made the point that brown paper bags are a pure commodity and all you can do is reduce costs. Other kinds of bags offer more opportunities for innovation and, thus, more margins. [...]

I had to blog the last two sessions on paper - there are no power sockets in the hotel (the Palazzo at the Venetian in Las Vegas, conference planners please note) and my battery eventually gave up. So, back in the hotel now, here’s a summary of the notes I took.
Sharyn Leaver presented on the [...]

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco was talking about the next phase of the internet - collaboration. The market is in transition - social networking has changed personal communities and these technologies will also transform the future of work. Cisco’s approach is to focus on transitions - not competitors, but market transitions. In ‘97 they focused [...]

Rich Lechner of IBM came next, talking about the new enterprise and it’s new enterprise data center. Supporting business innovation is impacted, he said, by three things:

Globalization
The change from an exporter to a multi-country set of counties to a truly globally integrated enterprise - tapping into new talent pools around the world.
Rising tide of information
More [...]

I spoke to Seth Grimes last week about an article he was writing that just published on Intelligent Enterprise -What BI Practitioners Can Learn From Operations Research. As I was reading the article I also noticed a response over on Michael Trick’s OR blog -Business Intelligence and Operations Research. Both Seth’s article and Michael’s response [...]

Back on this blog for John Rymer of Forrester talking about dynamic business applications (about which I have blogged before) and how the next generation of systems will be designed for people and built for change. John began by showing a video of a broker’s desktop demonstration built by Adobe and some partners. Brokers are [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]