Mini-blogging in Flickr

Here’s a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he’s actually turned this “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites” graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts’ new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog.

Very Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 webinar with Gartner

A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you’d see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You’ll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.

David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.

His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said “resistance is futile”, but that’s just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you’d better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don’t normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.

Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I’ve spent a bit of time with some IBM’ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it’s pretty progressive stuff — I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they’re part of Big Blue.

The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I’m assuming that there was no Q&A after all.

OMG Infopalooza

The OMG’s fall newsletter is out (although as my Aussie friends remind me, it’s spring down there), including notice of their technical meeting in DC on December 4-8. This will include a session by OMG BPMI on “Improving Business Process Management using a Maturity Model Framework”:

“The OMG BPMI Steering Committee has been developing a plan for a Maturity Model for business process improvement, called the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). This program will discuss how such a BPMM would guide organizational change, relate to existing OMG standards, and how it could be made available for widespread use and adoption through the OMG standards development process. The BPMM authors include Dr. Bill Curtis and Charlie Weber, who were lead authors for the CMM/CMMI. Dr. Curtis also authored the PCMM (SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model). Topics covered will include introduction and discussion of the BPMM draft, and how it can be used by business, government and vendor communities. Specific attention will be paid to how BPMM could elevate success rates for SOA initiatives.”

There’s also an interview with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, who is now the BPMI steering committee chair within OMG. I realize that vendors on standards committees make valuable contributions, I’m just not sure that having one run the whole show is a good idea. Are other vendors worried that the standards produced by BPMI will favour Lombardi? Or is this just a great way of forcing all the vendors to participate in the process, since they’ll be afraid of what might happen when they’re out of the room?

CentraSite portal and blogs now officially launched

I wrote back in July about CentraSite, a standards-based SOA forum and a freely-available product for SOA registry, repository and other functions. This week, I received notice that CentraSite is now launched (I guess that I was playing with beta code before), and that there will be a number of blogs hosted on the site to talk more about SOA. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; it has Fujitsu and Software AG behind it, and there’s obviously been a lot of work put into the product, but I don’t have enough experience with this class of product to tell if it’s a potential winner or not.

Proforma for ITIL

ITIL is not a subject that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but John Clark from HP does. John sat beside me for all of day 2 (except when he was presenting 🙂 ), and I had the chance to talk to he and his wife at lunch. After his presentation, we had a quick session of dueling devices: I showed him the lingerie show photos on Flickr on my Blackberry, and he surfed to the same site on his laptop via a Bluetooth connection to his smartphone.

John’s presentation was about work that the HP Consulting organization had done for Lucent in the area of IT service change management. We saw some of the workflow diagrams that they had created in ProVision for modelling ITIL controls and policies, for example, for Lucent’s incident management process. They integrated the launch and display of ProVision content directly into the HP OpenView Service Desk application for publishing a visualization of the process models directly to the users; this allowed users to see their role in the process in context without having to request that information from the modelling team.

As John put it, it make the users “unconsciously competent”, something that we should all strive to do when designing and building systems.

Strategic Planning with Enterprise Architecture

Laura Six-Stallings from QAD gave a presentation on how they are using enterprise architecture for strategic corporate planning, which absolutely fascinated me since most EA projects that I’ve been involved in have been focussed at much lower levels. She used some wonderfully funny war analogies, going so far to call ProVision a “weapon of mass depiction”, which takes the prize for the best quote of the day.

Since I had been online earlier and determined that her presentation was not available on the Proforma website, I ended up taking a lot of notes, so have a better memory of this presentation than some of the others. I didn’t see anything in the presentation that would have made it particularly proprietary, since she didn’t show their actual strategic planning results, just talked about the methodology for achieving it, but some companies are more paranoid than others.

They started their EA initiative in 2002 with about a dozen business and technology architects, and started using ProVision just last year to implement the Zachman framework. They have a very holistic view of EA, from corporate strategy on down, and they hit their strategic planning process as an early target for EA. Like many organizations, they did their strategic planning in PowerPoint and Word; with over 60 pages of slides and 280 pages of backup documentation, it was a time-consuming and error-prone process to create it in the first place, then to map that onto the more concrete goals of the organization. By implementing EA and ProVision, they were looking to improve the entire process, but also gain some clarity of alignment between strategy, business and technology, and some clarity of ownership over processes and strategies.

She made several turns of phrase that elicited a knowing laugh from the audience — IKIWISI [I Know It When I See It] requirements; As-Was and Could-Be models — but really brought home the challenges that they had to overcome, and the wins that they are expecting as this process rolls out. The biggest issues weren’t surprising: a perception of complexity, based in part of the limited ProVision expertise within QAD, and the cultural shift required to embrace a new way of modelling their strategic plans. However, they now have a long-term strategic plan based roughly on balanced scorecard objectives, and have a whole list of anticipated benefits:

  • Common taxonomy and semantics
  • A holistic multi-dimensional view of enterprise activities
  • Enforced alignment to the strategic plan model
  • Exposure of dependencies, relationships, impacts and conflicts
  • Improved communication and acceptance of the strategic plan
  • Improved priority management
  • Common processes
  • Effective reporting and analysis
  • Improved collaboration

Quite lofty goals, but achievable given the level that they’re attacking with EA. What I took away from this, and from other conversations that I had during the two days, is that to many people, “EA” really translates to IT architecture, but not at QAD.

Process 2006 Day 1 – Wrapup

The first day ended a bit sluggishly. First, a demonstration of an electronic whiteboard for use in interactive process design, which didn’t seem to offer any benefits over a standard laptop (or tablet PC) plus a projector. Next, a truly uninspiring panel of four vendors hosted by Jon Pyke without any real focus; they each talked about themselves, then there were some questions from Jon and the audience that really didn’t grab the crowd. At 5pm, they started an hour-long (!!) awards session that I can’t believe many people stayed for, unless they were really desperate for the free drinks afterwards. If I were a vendor, I’d be a bit pissed off that the afternoon actually encouraged people to bail out before the evening drinks session, since it was in the vendor demonstration area and intended as a chance to visit the vendor booths. However, I ducked out early from the awards session and found the bar open, so all ended well.

Suggestions to Steve Towers and the BPMG team about what to improve for next time:

  • Free wifi for conference attendees, not just those who are staying at that hotel
  • Session descriptions, rather than just the titles, to assist in making a decision about which session to attend
  • No unstructured panel of vendors talking about themselves
  • No hour-long awards session

Other than that, it was pretty good.

Spectrum Radio on the FBI case file debacle

I’ve been a member of IEEE for over 20 years, and browse the periodicals that arrive at my door monthly, but have just become aware of the content that they offer to members and non-members on Spectrum Online. I’ve downloaded a number of the podcasts from Spectrum Radio and thoroughly enjoyed the two-parter about the enormously expensive and unsuccessful FBI case file project (I’d love to link to it directly, but they have a stupid Flash interface that doesn’t allow that, so you’ll just have to find it on the Radio page).

IEEE actually had to litigate to have the report about this project released under freedom of information laws, and the software experts in discussion on the podcast dissect the report and talk about what went wrong as well as lessons that can be learned for any large software project. Interesting that a company that has CMM level 5 certification can end up developing a $170M project with no proper requirements, no enterprise architecture, and a number of other things that seem like no-brainers for any large software project. Worth listening.

Windows Live Writer

I saw a post about Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging tool, on Rick’s blog a couple of days ago, and decided to try it out. So far, I’m pretty impressed, although I haven’t used any other offline blogging tools so don’t have much to compare it to.

I do like that it integrates seamlessly with all three of my blogs: this one, which is uses Movable Type, my personal blog, which uses WordPress, and my wine club blog, which uses Blogger. I now have virtually the same interface for posting to all three blogs, and can even edit previously published posts. It also sucks in all the categories from each of the applicable blogs, so I have my full list of categories for tagging.

I’m sure that I’ll manage to break it soon, and will be ranting about it by week’s end, but so far I’m still having fun.