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Archives for June 2010

New Business Ecology Initiative Podcast: Aleks Buterman on Decoding Business/IT Unity

June 30, 2010 By brenda michelson

This morning, the Business Ecology Initiative released a new podcast of Aleks Buterman (@aleksb6) speaking on Decoding Business and IT Unity.  From my BEI post:

“Utilizing a case study approach, Buterman spoke of classic and newly identified failure patterns associated with enterprise technology investment. Interestingly, Buterman’s case studies extend beyond initial delivery, to focus on real-world challenges of product, program and business sustainment brought on by unanticipated customer and business unit demand, organizational change and insufficient architectural investment.

For preventive and corrective measures, Buterman advocates a capability portfolio approach to bring complexity to a manageable level. The capability portfolio approach considers four dimensions: business, technology, organization and risk. Buterman emphasized the need to apply business discipline, particularly risk assessment and management, throughout business-technology lifecycles.

Amplifying Buterman’s findings was a special video conference guest appearance from a vice president at a large Fortune 500 Financial Services firm.”

To listen to an audio recording of Aleks’ presentation go here.

 

[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Filed Under: business ecology, business-technology

gone (business-technology-capability-value) dot-linking …

June 25, 2010 By brenda michelson

Ok, even my brother is giving me grief about not blogging.  And he’s not even in tech. Yes.  I’ve been varying degrees of quiet.  Guilty as charged.

As my former CIO always presumed, the longer my silence, the greater likelihood I was up to something.  She was right. Extrapolating forward, I must be up to something.  In fact, I am. 

Over the last 12-18 months, I’ve had several ah-ha moments.  Resulting in seemingly random ideas scattered throughout the business-technology universe.   Luckily, I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I keep circling the same ideas, something will come.  Eventually.

Well, that finally happened.  Emerging from the mystery of background processing, I began to link-these-dots with each other, and within a business value context.  I was so close.

Oddly, a recent rant of mine on Twitter, about the impedance mismatch of the tech industry’s product-orientation with enterprises’ capability-orientation, ended up being my missing link.

Now, I’m quietly (yet excitedly) weaving everything together in a compelling narrative.  No surprise, I started with the framing diagrams.

So, to my brother Alan, and my many supportive readers, please bear with me a little bit longer.  I have a good feeling about this. 

And yes, Guillermo, I will now seriously revisit the “book thing”.

Filed Under: business-technology, Elemental Links

Next for EA2010? Exploring the Business of Successful Enterprise Architecture Practices

June 15, 2010 By brenda michelson

The BPM/SOA Community of Practice’s EA2010 Group is returning to the discussion forum.  Starting next week, EA2010 will pursue a new line of discussion and research focusing on the business aspects of successful enterprise architecture practices.  Items for discussion include:

  • Establishing and sustaining credibility with business and IT constituents
  • Business Outcome rather than Business Model alignment
  • Injecting financial measurement and decision-making acumen into EA
  • Catalyzing a business architecture practice

All members of the BPM/SOA Community of Practice are welcome to participate in the EA2010 Working Group.  For more information, see the EA2010 working group page.

Did you miss the group’s prior work?  Last year, the EA2010 team pursued a line of discussion and research on the purpose, practices and realities of expanding, or in some cases starting, business architecture practices.  This work stream culminated in the publication of an EA2010 Business Architecture whitepaper. 

And yes, the BPM/SOA Community of Practice is the renamed, post-merger, combination of the SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium.

 

[Disclosure: The BPM/SOA Community of Practice is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Filed Under: bpm, enterprise architecture, services architecture, soa

Dean Kamen’s FIRST: Celebrating & Inspiring Science and Technology

June 14, 2010 By brenda michelson

Last Wednesday at IBM’s Innovate Conference, I had the opportunity to catch Dean Kamen’s inspirational keynote on the life changing (and saving) inventions he has pioneered at DEKA, as well as his mission to inspire future generations of engineers, scientists and technologists via his FIRST program.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Sciences and Technology) is an annual robotics competition for students of all ages, starting with Lego Leagues for elementary school students and progressing in materials, skills and complexity from middle school to collegiate levels.

Kamen shared that his purpose in speaking at Innovate was self-serving.  He is seeking mentors and support for the FIRST program.  An article on Kamen, entitled Mr. Segway’s Difficult Path, is featured in the Economist’s current Technology Quarterly:

“Their answer, Mr Kamen hopes, will name-check FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a glitzy robotics competition that he started in 1989 and which now attracts over 200,000 entrants annually from schools in 56 countries. Working in teams supervised by a professional scientist or engineer, children construct and control robots in a series of competitive challenges, egged on by cheerleaders, screaming parents and the prospect of scholarships worth $12.2m in 2010 alone.

If that all sounds suspiciously similar to American high-school sports, it is no accident. “I want kids to realise that engineering and problem solving are every bit as fun and rewarding as bounce, bounce, bounce, throw,” says Mr Kamen. “I want FIRST to compete with the Superbowl, the World Series and the Olympics. The next generation of real wealth is going to be produced in fields like proteomics, genomics and nanotechnology. For that you need world-class technology people, and if kids don’t get on the train very early, it’s left the station.””

The article concludes with Kamen’s vision of his robotics competitors:

“Which brings him back to FIRST, the invention of which Mr Kamen is most proud. “It really is an invention because it was a different way to attack a fundamental social problem,” he says. “For any one product I worked on, if I didn’t do it, someone else would have. Maybe they would have done it a little later, or a little differently, but they would have done it. But when I look out in the stands at tens of thousands of kids each year during FIRST, I see all the scientists that are going to work on the really exciting stuff that’s going to happen over the next 15 years. They will be making materials that have no resistance and can carry millions of amps, creating materials that can make, store and transform energy, understanding how to build at a molecular level to synthesise proteins and fix health problems, literally by engineering life.””

If you have an engineering, science or technology background, or curious children, consider getting involved in FIRST. 

For more on Kamen’s work, check out his visits to the Steven Colbert Show.

Filed Under: business-technology, innovation Tagged With: STEM

Miss the Event Processing Symposium? Don’t Despair. Replays now available.

June 13, 2010 By brenda michelson

The replays of last Monday’s Event Processing Symposium are now available.  If you are even mildly interested in Event Processing, you should check out this program:

•    W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
•    Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
•    Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
•    Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software
•    Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.

Each session is about 30 minutes.  In support of the symposium (and on-going discussion) I created an Event Processing Community of Practice Linkedin Group. 

Check out the replays, join the Linkedin group and create value from the rise of event processing. 

 

[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community of Practice (CoP) is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Filed Under: event driven architecture, event processing

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Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

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