Three months ago, I wrote about how the free BIJ (Business Integration Journal), formerly EAI Journal, was becoming Business Transformation and Innovation — available only as a paid subscription. I believe that my comment at the time about paying for mostly vendor-written and vendor-sponsored material was “hahahahaha”. And my comment on the new name was “it doesn’t actually mean anything”.
This week, I received an invitation for a free subscription to Align Journal (their tagline is “Aligning IT and Business Strategy”), and when I went to the site (and the online PDF version of the Jan-Feb issue), it looked familiar, so I dug into their About page:
Align Journal is the next step in the evolution of Business Integration Journal (BIJ). Over the past two years, the focus of BIJ was broadened to bring a business perspective to the use of technology for gaining such benefits as faster time to market, governance, increased agility to pursue new opportunities, improvements in managing business processes, and cost savings through the reuse of application components. Since the editorial focus of BIJ had evolved to no longer be strictly focused on integration topics, it was time to also evolve the magazine’s name to Align Journal.
No mention of BTI, although if you go to the BTI URL that was advertised back in December when I wrote my post about it, it redirects to Align Journal.
If this first issue is any indication, it’s definitely trending away from purely integration topics: the table of contents divides the articles into Business Strategy (3 articles), Leadership/Communication (3 articles), Technology (2 articles), Innovation (1 article), and Governance/Compliance (1 article). It’s not clear to me, however, why “Maximizing IT for Effective Inventory Management” falls under Business Strategy, while “Leverage SOA to Increase Your Revenues” falls under Technology.
The paid subscription model is gone, unless you want the print copy and you’re outside the U.S., and the digital copy is provided in a PDF that allows printing, but unfortunately not content extraction (so you won’t see me quoting from it here — I’m too lazy to retype what they’ve already published). And the name still doesn’t actually mean anything.