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 [...]
Great graphic by Dave Gray of XPLANE, showing the difference between generalists and specialists. Click through on the image to his Flickr page to see in full resolution, or view it directly on his blog, there’s a lot of other great material there. His key point: generalists are best at defining the problem or goal, [...]
First session of the last morning, Eduardo Chiocconi of BEA and Rob Wald of JPMorgan Chase talked about the ALBPM UI: what comes out of the box, and what you can build yourself. Out of the box, ALBPM has three user interfaces alternatives: HiPer WorkSpace, a full user workspace with menus based on their permissions, [...]
I’m jumping around between tracks (and hence rooms): I started the afternoon in the ALUI Experience track, then on to the ALBPM Technical/Developer track, and now I’m in the ALBPM Experience track for a discussion of best practices for managing BPM projects with Dan Atwood of BEA (another former Fuego employee) and Karl Djernal of [...]
David Messerschmitt, a prof at UC Berkeley and the Helsinki University of Technology, finished the formal presentations for the day with a talk on how inter-firm cooperation can be improved in the software industry. This is an interesting wrap-up, since we’ve been hearing about technology, applications and business opportunities all day, and this takes a [...]
Bob Glushko, a prof at UC Berkeley, and Shelley Evenson, a prof at CMU, discussed different views on bridging the front stage and back stage in service system design. As a side note, I have to say that it’s fun to be back (temporarily) in an academic environment: many of these presentations are much more [...]
Martin Griss of CMU West and Adam Blum of Mobio Networks had a fairly interactive discussion about integrating traditional software engineering practices into modern service oriented development. Griss is a big proponent of agile development, and believes that the traditional software development process is too ponderous; Blum admits to benefits from smaller teams and lightweight [...]
Michael Cusumano is with the MIT Sloan School of Management, and has written several books on the changing software industry; he spoke today about the changing business of software. In general, there is a decline of new enterprise software product revenues, and growth in services and maintenance sales. There are a number of new business [...]
Often, when I receive a request for a meeting on something that’s far outside of my usual BPM/Enterprise 2.0 interests, I’ll turn it down. However, when the meeting is with various deans and professors at Carnegie Mellon University West about their new Masters in Software Management program (press release here), I’m happy to make an [...]
I had an email yesterday from my friend Robb, which I have his permission to publish here. Robb used to work for me — in fact, I think that I hired him a total of three times — and whenever a company seeking to hire him calls me for a reference, I always tell them [...]
I was on the treadmill this morning with Malcolm Gladwell. Actually, he was on my iPod, and I was watching his talk from TED 2004, which was posted recently on the TEDTalks site (not sure if the timing is correct — although the website claims that this was recorded in February 2004, Gladwell mentions his [...]
I’ve been a member of IEEE for over 20 years, and browse the periodicals that arrive at my door monthly, but have just become aware of the content that they offer to members and non-members on Spectrum Online. I’ve downloaded a number of the podcasts from Spectrum Radio and thoroughly enjoyed the two-parter about the [...]
I’ve been watching the TED videos recently, and there’s some very interesting stuff (who knew Al Gore could be that funny?), but this one of Jeff Han displaying a new type of user interface is amazing. If you’re interested in data visualization, check out the Hans Rosling one as well.
Veneer was great, but short, so I’m on to Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here. I’m starting to slow down — it’s was a long day of travel yesterday and a long day of idea generation today — so may not finish up all my posts today. The next session for me was AJAX design patterns, [...]
This is brilliant: an article by Martin Fowler in IEEE Software magazine from a few years back (via Julian On Software) really nails the issue of agility and complexity by referencing, oddly enough, a speech given by economist Enrico Zaninotto at the XP 2002 conference. Fowler says: One aspect I found particularly interesting was his [...]
Phil Wainewright posted one of the IT commandments today: Thou shalt document all thy works. This is a perfect followup to my post yesterday about SOA and data, although it may not appear obvious at first. Problem: application developers don’t use services when they should; in yesterday’s post, I was talking about how they squirrel [...]
Yesterday, I posted a rather whiny entry about rude customers (and Bob McIlree was kind enough to give me a comforting pat on the shoulder, virtually speaking — thanks Bob!) so today I decided to get a bit more productive. Moving from whine to wine, I finally made my first cut of a Squidoo lens [...]
That’s the thing about mashups, almost all of them are illegal I heard that (and unfortunately am unable to credit the source) in the “scrAPI” session at Mashup Camp, in which we discussed the delicate nature of using a site that doesn’t have APIs as part of a mashup. Adrian Holovaty of ChicagoCrime.org (my favourite [...]
The flight home from Mashup Camp was a great opportunity to catch up on my notes from the past couple of weeks, including several ideas triggered by discussions at the TIBCO seminar last week: some because I disagreed with the speakers, but some because I agreed with them. I split my opinions on the discussions [...]
Joe McKendrick posted last week about whether open source or SOA is killing the software industry faster, right on the heels of a couple of articles in eWeek about how E-Trade is switching to open source (E-Trade’s not just implementing Linux, which would hardly raise an eyebrow these days, but also components higher up in [...]
