Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information - e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first:

Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers - now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an overall [...]

Neil and I caught up with Joe Foley, Chief Architect and Kirsten Chapman, VP Global Marketing and Alliances from i-lluminate this week. illuminate (www.i-lluminate.com) is a Spanish company that has recently begun to expand in the US.
illuminate is trying to tackle what it sees as the unsolved performance problem of ad-hoc analysis in companies who [...]

Last up for me today were some folks from IBM on IBM Metadata Strategy - An Information Management Perspective. IBM’s focus is Information on Demand - getting information about of the data management layer and into an integration layer from which it can be delivered as business intelligence and performance management. I, of course, would [...]

Darren from ASG presented next on Metadata enabled Business/IT Integration. Business metadata can be contained in all sorts of things like data models, XML and database schemas, process definitions, ERP/CRM etc. Not clear who created what or which ones are “right” and things like mergers and acquisitions may create new problems. There is no “right” [...]

Next up was a session from some folks at ASG talking about business metadata. They started by discussing the metadata audience and how it is changing as the syntactic and semantic richness of metadata increases. Initially there was a focus on consistent definitions for, say, COBOL copy books. Gradually expanded out to DBAs, Data Architects [...]

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? [...]

Neil and I are both speaking at the DAMA International Symposium & WILSHIRE Meta-Data Conference March 16-20, 2008 in San Diego. Our sessions are both on Tuesday March 18th:

James - Business Rules, Decision Management and Smarter Systems
Neil - Tainted Truth: Understanding Industry Surveys

There’s a discount price until Feb 8th. We would love to see you [...]

Mike replied to my post about his question on enterprise metadata. He, like me, prefers David Marco’s definition of metadata as “all physical data and knowledge from inside and outside an organization, including information about the physical data, technical and business processes, rules and constraints of the data, and structures of the data used by [...]

Mike Kavis, a blogger on ITToolbox and Chief Architect, sent me an interesting question about enterprise metadata
He says “My company has huge amounts of historical data. We load 500M new rows a day and keep data for 116 weeks. I am trying to move this company away from being report writers to being [...]