April 2006 Archives

For the code monkeys in the crowd, you'll fall out of your cubicle laughing at this. (via Sutha Kamal)... Read More..

I attended TorCampDemoCamp5 this week, my first DemoCamp and a great opportunity to see some new stuff, meet some new people and catch up with some acquaintances. The popularity of this forum is amazing: there were probably 130+ people there,... Read More..

I'll never be in Technorati's top 100 (or anywhere near it), but I passed a milestone recently by breaking the top 100,000 with this blog. Not bad, considering that Technorati tracks over 35 million sites. If you're not familiar with... Read More..

I listened in on an ebizQ webinar today, The Path to SOA Enlightenment, and some interesting points came up about SOA education. The sponsor of the webinar was the Integration Consortium, which of course has a vested interest in encouraging... Read More..

If it's easier for you to check your email for Column 2 blog posts than to visit this site, you can now subscribe to the posts by email. Just fill in your email address in the right sidebar under the... Read More..

Although the AIIM E-DOC magazine site still shows the January/February issue, you can find the link to the article that I wrote for the March/April issue here (or check out the dead-tree version of the publication). In this article, I... Read More..

Phil Gilbert's post last week exposes the Emperor's clothes for what they are: BPEL is just another implementation language: It's simply a new way to write code. It has nothing to do with the management of business processes. I don't... Read More..

I saw this post by John Wu on the myth of business process-centric enterprise definition (via Lucas Rodríguez Cervera), and I find it hard to see how anyone gets away with "defining the enterprise based on business process modeling in... Read More..

An article by Bruce Silver in Intelligent Enterprise discusses the recent spate of BPM vendors releasing their process modelling tools for free. He lists Savvion, Oracle and Intalio, but the trend is widening -- TIBCO just announced the availability of... Read More..

Jean-Christophe Dichant, an ex-colleague of mine from FileNet, is back to blogging about BPM (en français), and has the first in what he promises to be a series of posts on the major issues in organizations that can be addressed... Read More..

A cool map that you can create of the countries that you've visited. Here's mine: create your own visited countries map When I look at it, I'm more amazed by the places that I haven't been (nothing in South America?... Read More..

I received an email from James Taylor today, and on second reading, I noticed the following in small print at the end of his signature block: Despite not being sent from my Blackberry, this email may nevertheless be terse and... Read More..

I've just registered for the OMG's BPM Think Tank in Washington DC on May 23-25. The program is mostly about standards, which is a big focus for me right now. It will be a chance to see some people who... Read More..

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... Read More..

If you're into open source BPM, you'll be interested to know that Red Hat announced today that they're buying JBoss, makers of the open source jBPM and jBoss Rules (formerly jRules) products.... Read More..

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.... Read More..

I've had two "inconsiderate customer" incidents this week; actually, both are customers who I've done quite a bit of work for in the past but have been inactive for some time. With customer #1, I contracted in as their business... Read More..

I've made some updates to my Squidoo BPM lens, adding a list of BPM vendors with some initial comments (more to come on that), as well as updating the book list to include recent reads such as Andrew Spanyi's More... Read More..

I realize that women bloggers in Toronto aren't exactly my main reader demographic, so you guys in Nebraska and Bangalore can just skip this, but there's interest brewing in having a BlogHer North in Toronto. Spurred on by a post... Read More..

Do you hate the Microsoft "dinosaur" commercials as much as I do? If so, you'll love the skewering that they receive at the hands of the Economist's illustrator this week, accompanying an article entitled Spot the dinosaur (paid subscription required):... Read More..

I went looking at last year's BPMG conference webpage to find out about this year's conference, and was surprised to see that not only have they moved their conference to September, but they're headlining a European Gartner BPM summit in... Read More..

My evangelism has paid off again, and I've convinced Sharon Boyes-Schiller of SkyScape Solutions to start blogging. Sharon and I met at the BPMG conference in London last year and have had a few conversations via email and Skype since... Read More..

According to Davenport, innovation is back in style. As he points out, however, 70% of that focus is on product innovation, and that organizations need to be thinking about a "broad portfolio of innovation domains", including process, services, managerial approaches... Read More..

With that title, you can just imagine the black-cassocked priest striding across the Irish moors to confront his personal demons... or maybe I have an overactive imagination from watching a rerun of The Thorn Birds last night. Anyway, this isn't... Read More..

The last day at the Gartner conference was a short one for me: I skipped the vendor sessions in the morning, so only attended Daryl Plummer's session "BPM in the Service Oriented Architecture" and the Andrew Spanyi talk at lunch... Read More..

I finished up Tuesday at the conference with Bill Rosser's "Creating a Business Architecture". I found his enterprise architecture models to be a bit inconsistent: at one point, he includes application architecture in information architecture; later, he splits them out... Read More..