Inferences for ‘07

Last year’s inferences lead to an unexpectedly high 83% success rate. This will be hard to beat, especially because my new batch of nine inferences will be stated in more measurable ways, leaving little room for history rewriting. Let’s give it a shot anyway, and meet again on December 31st, 2007 for our yearly performance review. In the meantime, happy new year to all! [Continue…]

Scorecard

364 days ago, I published my inferences for ‘06. A year has passed, and time has come to take a look back and see how good (or bad) I did back then. Tomorrow, I will publish a new batch, and review them a year from now. [Continue…]

The World is Flat Breakfast

The first IT|Redux breakfast took place today and was a great success. The goal of the meeting was to identify the 11th flattener, following Thomas Friedman’s list of 10 flatteners in The World is Flat. [Continue…]

First IT|Redux Breakfast

Weblogs are great networking tools, but nothing can beat the old-fashioned face-to-face meeting, especially when it comes with good food and drinks. With that in mind, I have decided to organize regular events during which readers of this blog will be able to meet and discuss about recently-covered topics. The first event of this type will be a breakfast to take place at the Sofitel in Redwood City, CA on Tuesday, April 18, 2006, from 8:00 AM to 10 AM. [Continue…]

The World is Flat

I just finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In his last book, Friedman identifies ten events and trends that are flattening the world we live in today. I agreed with most of the thesis, and tried to relate to it my own experience working at Intalio.

BPM Inferences for ‘06

This is my first monthly BPM column for Business Process Trends. In order to set the stage for a new year of BPM, here is a set of inferences for ‘06 based on my personal experiences, insights and desires. Some are fairly straightforward, others highly speculative, but most should matter to all BPM practitioners. Interestingly enough, the first inference — BPM will go mainstream — got a step closer to being fulfilled this morning: IBM just announced the release of the new System i5, also known as iSeries, also known as AS/400. As part of this announcement they are featuring a front & center quote from yours truly. Intalio|BPMS becomes the first BPM solution to be available for System i5, and if that does not make BPM mainstream, I do not know what will.

Destination Ukraine

At Intalio, we started looking at offshoring part of our software development work in late 2004. During the first half od 2005, we focused our attention to India, flew there a couple of times, talked to about 20 firms, and finally engaged with one. After experiencing a significant turnover in the employee base of our offshoring partner, we decided that the model was not working for us and that we would be better off keeping all software development onshore, in-house.

Our primary goal with offshore had been to reduce costs, but cheaper does not mean better if you cannot capitalize on a team that keeps together over a long-enough period of time. At least this is my personal experience with software engineering. In that game, your most valuable assets walk through the door at the end of the day, and this is true offshore as much as it is onshore. This post tells the story of what changed my mind about offshore, and how we are doing it today in a very successful manner.

Inferences for ‘06

Happy New Year to all!
Everybody does it, so here are my inferences for ‘06:
BPMS will go mainstream
With BPEL gaining support for distributed transactions and human workflow while BPMN is receiving the blessing of the OMG, industry standards are making the BPMS ready for mainstream adoption. Just in time for Gartner to release the first BPMS magic quadrant […]

Offshoring

Welcome to IT|Redux