TUCON: Keynote Day 2

Tom Laffey was back hosting the keynote, dressed in a cycling shirt from Team TIBCO, one of the best US women’s pro cycling teams. He was joined briefly by a member of the team who also happens to hold a Ph.D. in biology; like any geeky engineer, Laffey giggled nervously in the presence of an attractive, brainy woman in form-fitting cycling gear, although I suspect that some of the nervousness was due to the pair of cycling shorts that she was handing him to try on. 🙂

Having covered the product announcements yesterday, this morning’s keynote moved to a customer focus, starting with Simon Post, CTO of Carphone Warehouse discussing how they improved the processes within their IT department. He made an excellent point: there is no "ERP for IT", that is, packaged software for running an IT business; this requires large IT groups roll their own process improvement efforts instead. They have the capability to do it, but that’s not the point: the IT departments are there to provide services to the business, not to spend time building systems for themselves unless no packaged software exists or they need custom capability for a competitive advantage. Carphone Warehouse uses TIBCO products extensively for their IT processes and systems: iProcess and BusienssEvents for the process layer, BusinessWorks for system orchestration, and EMS for messaging. They haven’t stopped at IT processes, however; they’re building their service-oriented architecture and rolling out services across the enterprise, facilitating reuse and reducing costs as they set up new locations in several countries.

I ducked out after that to review notes for my presentation, coming up at 11:30, since I want to take the time to see the Spotfire+BPM session that’s on just before mine.

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