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Process mining – creating passive management systems?

Although it’s not a formal part of the BPM research programme I set out in advance at the end of last year, in the past few weeks I’ve been drawn into looking in some detail at the emerging process mining space. Process mining has been an active academic research space for some years (and eminent [...]

Posted on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 by

Developing process applications: a place for everything, and everything in its place

Over the years I’ve been part of many conversations that revolve around how ‘BPM’ is not the same as ‘BPMN’ (in the context of process automation). The point consistently made is that even when you’re tackling work improvement scenarios that are suitable for modelling with BPMN (i.e. scenarios where the structure of work can be [...]

Posted on Friday, February 3, 2012 by

Understanding the options for Big Data in the cloud

Of all the conversations and discussions held at Salesforce’s customer day in Egham this week, one in particular struck a chord with me. Cloudapps, an ISV and partner of Salesforce, spoke briefly about the challenges of capturing, storing and analysing Big Data, in particular telecom mast sensor data, on the Force.com platform.  Although there wasn’t [...]

Posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 by

Systems of co-ordination: greasing the wheels of engagement

Ever since I read Geoffrey Moore’s Future of IT paper introducing the concept of systems of engagement (published last year), I’ve had a slight uneasiness about the ongoing discourse. For a long time it was nothing I could put my finger on, but in some recent conversations about how technology can improve business agility, I [...]

Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 by

Having the common touch – IBM’s next Big Data challenge

At a recent analyst day in Hursley Labs, IBM outlined its current and future plans for Big Data. The company clearly sees a huge business opportunity in this market by helping customers extract value from new, complex and voluminous data sources to uncover deeper and richer insights that have previously not been possible before. However, [...]

Posted on Friday, September 30, 2011 by

Calling BS on… “You’re an order-taker, or a strategic enabler”

Over the past couple of years we’ve all heard more and more talk about the potential for IT to transform business and drive innovation and profitability – and hand-in-hand with this, the potential for CIOs to be seen as in charge of IT groups that are true ‘strategic business enablers’ rather than simple cost centres. [...]

Posted on Friday, September 9, 2011 by

Wanted: corporate chiropractors

Internet/marketing guru (there’s not many other words that will do) Seth Godin wrote a post on an idea that’s dear to my heart a few days ago: Hire an architect. For me, the killer lines are I’m talking about intentionally building a structure and a strategy and a position, not focusing your energy on the [...]

Posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 by

Running IT as a business: don’t be daft

In the past couple of days I’ve read a couple of articles (“IT can’t be a service provider and a partner too” and “Run IT as a business – why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen“) that riff on the same theme: that the exhortation to “run IT as a business” leads you down [...]

Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 by

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Interview on IASA, the value of architecture, and Cloud Computing

While I was at IASA’s ITARC NYC the other week, Matt Deacon (day job: developer/architect evangelist for Microsoft in the UK; evening job: UK Chapter President of IASA) interviewed me about my thoughts on the value of architecture, the role of IASA and also about the talk I gave at the event. The talk I [...]

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 by

IASA: making architecture work

Last week I spent three days in Manhattan, attending the International Association of Software Architects (IASA)’s IT Architecture Regional Conference (ITARC) in NY. That’s a long time for me to be anywhere – so why did I do it? The first answer is the speaker lineup – there were keynotes from Len Bass of Carnegie-Mellon’s [...]

Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 by