My Time Between Airports

Obviously, I’ve been remiss in my blogging.  I spent the majority of May and June on the road.  During that period, my writing was limited to the specific engagement, or email to business associates and friends of the following pattern: "Delayed at [airport code] waiting on [crew, plane, weather, parts]".  My favorite was Cincinnati when we couldn’t take off because of a hole in the runway.  A hole that "mysteriously appeared" in the time between boarding and pulling away from the gate…

Between airports, I attended InformaticaWorld and IBM’s Impact, delivered SOA training and workshops in Ohio with my friend Beth Gold Bernstein, facilitated a roundtable discussion on business architecture and SOA at ArchitectureGov, and ran the SOA Consortium’s Inaugural European events in Brussels.

Yes, I’ve been busy.  At the moment, I’m heading to San Francisco, to represent the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank.  My upcoming events include:

Agile2007 in Washington D.C. – I’m still looking for perspectives, practices and stories of Agile and SOA

New England BEA User Group in Cambridge, MA – I’m excited to hear my friend Annie Shum’s latest thinking on IT, Innovation and the (messy) Human Factor.

SOA Consortium meeting in Jacksonville – As SOA-C Program Director, I plan and facilitate these meetings

Enterprise Architecture Conference in Las Vegas – I’m speaking on SOA and Business Architecture

OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal – I’m participating in a panel discussion on the Future of SOA

Of course, it’s not my intent to attend these events and then hoard the knowledge.  I’ve been meaning to share insights from each of my travels, amongst other things.  But, I can’t seem to find the time, or perhaps focus.  Two factors to blame there.  One, the Maine summer.  When I am home, I find myself drawn to outdoor activities.  Two, I tend to scribble my ideas on paper, note cards, etc, which doesn’t lend itself to quick posts.  As for the latter, I’m experimenting with TiddlyWiki as a way to capture and organize (through tags) my field notes and random thoughts.  Hopefully, this will lend some much needed structure to my process, and result in more frequent and timely posts.  It certainly can’t make it worse!

In the meantime, I do plan on looking back, and sharing insights from the last couple of months.  You can also find some SOA related writing from me at the SOA Consortium blog.  As well, the SOA Consortium’s first Executive Summit whitepaper is now publicly available.

If you are going to any of the future events I’ve listed and want to connect, email me – bmichelson at elementallinks dot com.

Oh, I picked TiddlyWiki because I wanted something simple that I could install locally.  If you are evaluating Wikis, I recommend this comparison site.