InfoQ Homepage Business/IT Alignment Content on InfoQ
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An Agile PM Walks a Mile in a Customer's Shoes
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.
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Interview: Steve Jones on "Business-driven SOA"
In this interview, recorded at QCon London, Stefan Tilkov talks to Cap Gemini's Steve Jones about his concept of a business service architecture. Topics covered include how to apply SOA to existing systems, the problems one runs into when SOA is driven by technology, and the structural and organizational impact of business-driven SOA.
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Metastorm Aquires Proforma
Metastorm, the maker of the Metastorm BPM Suite, has acquired Proforma, an Enterprise Architecture/Process Modeling tool vendor. The acquisition makes Metastorm one of the few vendors able to offer BPM and EA Modeling together.
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Is SOA about the technology?
Nick Gall wrote a post claiming that discussion of SOA without also connecting it to technology is problematic. Nick bases his post on a post by Andrew McAfee that attacks the notion of "It's not about the technology" (INATT) Sure technology is important, but on the other hand... aren't business needs more important?
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Making Agile Methods and Enterprise Architecture Play Nice
A report from the Cutter Consortium asks Are Agile Methods and Enterprise Architecture Compatible? and answers "Yes, with Effort." The authors recommended specific techniques to allow Agile Methods and Enterprise Architecture to be mutually beneficial. Moreover, their observations, analysis, and recommendations are directly applicable to the meshing of AM and SOA.
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Article: SOA Governance - Long-Term SOA Implementation and Management
In this article, Wolfgang Keller explores the challenges in SOA adoption and discusses the commonalities and differences of SOA governance to overall IT governance. He discusses why SOA initiatives frequently get bogged down, and how the anchoring of SOA in an IT governance can help make SOA a success.
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Blocking: Useful? Dangerous? Ethical?
George Dinwiddie commented on a discussion that took place in the eXtreme Programming yahoogroup about "blocking" as described by Scott Ambler: "This is a great example of something that I call blocking, where you produce the paperwork, attend the meetings, pretend to care, ... to make it look as if you're following the 'official process'".
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Interview: IBM SOA VP Sandy Carter
Sandy Carter, author of "SOA and Web 2.0", talks about SOA at the business level: how to think about SOA, SOA vs. BPM, how to sell SOA to management, why SOA will be more long lived than EAI, and IBM's view that SOA adoption is now in the early majority phase
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A Growing IT-Business Gap: Agile to the Rescue?
A recent survey indicated that the gap between IT and Business is growing and that might signal a change in how enterprise technology is run. There are increasing reports of IT not meeting business needs. Does Agile address these issues - and if so where is the evidence?
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Can Agile Separate Team Concerns from Organizational Ones?
When it comes to agile methods, almost everyone agrees that agility can apply to the software development team and to the organization. This raises some questions: To what extent can the one be separated from the other? Can an agile team succeed if the organization around them doesn't wish to adapt to an agile approach?
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Aligning Agile with Enterprise Goals
Agile methods have achieved a level of success and respect within development teams, but it is not always easy to extend these methods beyond the development team. In Investing in Agile: Aligning Agile with Enterprise Goals, Dan Murphy and Dave Rooney stated that IT project management has evolved with agile methods, but that the enterprise hasn't followed suit.
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March Issue of the Agile Journal Examines Top-Down Agile Adoption
The Agile Journal's March issue examined how organizations can and do adopt Agile practices in a top-down fashion. Liz Barnett wrote that top-down support within an organization is essential for any wide-spread adoption and gave six areas that we should focus on for success.
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Article: Implementation of business rules and business processes in SOA
Boris Lublinsky and Didier Le Tien discuss how business process engines and business rule engines differ, where their respective strengths are and when to use what in an SOA context. They discuss commonalities and differences between business rules and business processes and present some guidelines on positioning business rules in SOA implementation and appropriate usage of each technology.
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Jon Udell joins Microsoft
Jon Udell will leave InfoWorld and its Test Center to join Microsoft. He will be joining the Channel 10 team to bridge the gap between "alpha geeks" and the mainstream civilization.
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Opinion: How to Tell Whether to Fire your Enterprise Architect
David Linthicum suggests there's a huge difference between "the traditional enterprise architecture crowd" and those who assess the value of SOA. He recommends a company might be in need of a new Enterprise Architect if they don't assess the value of SOA correctly.