John Rymer and Dave West presented a breakout session in the application development track on how Lean software development practices can be applied in your business. This obviously had a big focus on Agile, and how it can be used within large organizations. Unlike what some people think, Agile isn’t cowboy coding: it is quite [...]
The post title is the best quote from Tom Higgins, CIO of the Territory Insurance Office in Australia, who came all the way from Darwin to speak at both the Gartner and Forrester conferences this week. I had a chance for a chat at the airport with him while waiting for our flight from Orlando [...]
The morning finished with a panel moderated by Dave West of Forrester, and including Kevin Haynes of Dell and Dave Smoley of Flextronics. West started out talking about the inertia within IT: more than 60% of IT is spent just keeping the lights on, legacy systems inhibit change and vendors are slow to change. There [...]
John Swainson, CEO of CA, gave a presentation on how Lean can help companies built long-term competitive advantage during tough economic times in industries as diverse as manufacturing, healthcare, retail and IT, and how Lean IT – or what he referred to as the industrialization of IT – can deliver greater value at lower cost. [...]
We had a brief address from George Colony, CEO of Forrester, on changing from IT to BT, with one key message: if your CEO doesn’t understand what you’re talking about, then you’re probably not using “BT speak”. The CEO is focused on two things: higher profits, and revenue growth, and you need to translate your [...]
Tom Hughes, currently with CSC but formerly the CIO of the US Social Security Administration, spoke to us about Lean and the CIO. The imperative here is driven by surveys that show that (to paraphrase) business thinks that IT is important, but that they’re doing a crappy job. He believes that CIOs need to break [...]
I’ve moved from the Gartner BPM summit in Orlando to Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in Chicago, where the focus is on Lean as the new business imperative: how to use Lean concepts and methods to address the overly complex things in our business environment. Mike Gilpin opened the conference with a short address on how [...]
The last session of the last day, and a significant portion of the audience (especially those headed east) have bailed out but there’s still a few of us hanging around to hear Colin Teubner talk about optimizing business with BPM. I think that he drew the short straw as the junior guy, presenting in the last [...]
I ended up skipping the session after mine at the end of the morning, but had some great hallway conversations with some of the business rules vendors who indicated that they think that I’m on track with what I’m saying about BPM and BR. For the first of the afternoon sessions, I’m attending a panel [...]
I skipped the opening keynote by Shantanu Nayaren of Adobe and the talk by cognitive scientist Don Norman; my presentation is at 11am, and although I’m not a particularly nervous presenter, I felt that my time was better spent reviewing my notes, especially considering that I’ve crammed material from the three one-hour webinars that I [...]
We finished up the day with a panel of Forrester analysts addressing the issue of whether packaged applications (i.e., ERP software) will ever be designed for people and built for change — that is, can these apps ever be agile. This was structured as a debate monitored by Merv Adrian, pitting Sharyn Leaver on the [...]
Connie Moore moderated a panel on automating business processes, featuring David Knapp of Ford, Pamela Rucker of Philip Services and Theo van den Hurk of ABN AMRO. The room is considerably less crowded than this morning, so I’m guessing that there’s some golfing going on (probably all the CIOs whose golf games were rained out last week [...]
John Rymer, who I’ve read before on business rules topics, talked to us about why we should care about business rules software; Forrester’s position is that business rules are a key enabler of design for people, build for change. He started with definitions of business rules and a business rules platform, then went on to [...]
Lots of choice in the breakout sessions, but I’ve decided on Rob Koplowitz (who works with Connie Moore) on Web 2.0 and Social Computing in the Enterprise. The official statement: Enterprise Web 2.0 can drive new efficiencies, but it needs to be approached like any new technology coming into the enterprise. He had a good [...]
The last session before lunch was by Robert Wiseman, CTO of Sabre Holdings – interesting that the two customer keynotes this morning were both by travel-related companies. They have the same problems as many other organizations, in that they have to deal with large numbers of transactions and compete on pricing, but they’re doing it at a [...]
I saw Sandy Carter speak a week ago at the Gartner BPM conference, and as expected, there’s some amount of overlap from what I heard there in the first section on what’s driving business today and the nature of globally-integrated enterprises. Less talk about BPM (since this isn’t a BPM conference) and much more on [...]
Rich Phillips, the COO of Maritz Travel, was up next to talk about creating consistency and customer value through IT. Although not a part of his presentation, he opened with a great thought about the importance of people in the process: “If you don’t think about the people, you’re not going to get the change.” [...]
Connie Moore gave the opening keynote on Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term “blended business-IT” rather than “business-IT alignment” because she wants them to be seen as a [...]
Tom Pohlmann opened up the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum that I’m attending today and tomorrow, and it’s such an interesting contrast with the Gartner conference of last week. I’ve never been to a Forrester conference before, and the entire feeling is different than Gartner: more fun somehow; they seem to take themselves a bit less [...]
