Michael Blechar

I recently received a response to my blog entitled “Down With the Uber-Repository, Long Live Metadata!” criticizing my recommendation to not try to consolidate all your metadata into one “uber-repository”. Interestingly, while the respondent mentioned some success his company has had with that approach, he then went on to lament that the amount of metadata [...]

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The main path for applications development and deployment has historically been the business analyst (frequently residing in IT) getting requirements for some build or buy project and running it through the development or implementation process with limited collaboration until the application solution is ready to be tested and deployed. But the times they are [...]

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One of the highest priority objectives of most IT organizations is to collaborate better with the business units they serve. A good place to start in fortifying these relationships is on enterprise business process improvement (BPI) initiatives, since they require greater collaboration among business users, enterprise and business process architects, and analysts and their [...]

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When service-oriented architecture (SOA) platforms started to be implemented several years ago, I tracked the success and failure of the early adopters doing service-oriented development of applications (SODA). Most seemed to understand that building reusable software and data services was different from building siloed applications and required different development approaches. Most elected to use [...]

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When surveying stakeholders during planning activities, architects and analysts often hear a common refrain: "Managing information as an asset is core to our business strategy." While this objective has been popular for decades, it is getting renewed attention, notably from the executive suite – especially in terms of supporting business process management (BPM) and [...]

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While I am not a guru on Agile development methodologies (I defer to my colleague David Norton on these matters), nonetheless it is a topic of discussion on almost every call I do with clients interested in improving their speed of delivery of applications or wanting to improve their understanding of user requirements to [...]

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Business agility requires shifting to a service-oriented mentality, enabled by service-oriented architectures. However, unless organizations also shift their people, processes and technologies to service-oriented development of applications (SODA), SOA will fail to achieve its anticipated benefits.
The emergence of Web services and service-oriented development of applications (SODA) provides a major boost for enterprise agility. Without SODA, [...]

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I find it both interesting and frustrating that most business process improvement projects focus so much on process improvement to the exclusion of data improvement. Improving business agility by breaking down years of siloed transactions, programs and processes into more flexible and reusable software services is clearly a good thing to do. But what about [...]

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Because I get to deal with both Gartner customers involved with business process management (BPM) initiatives and service-oriented development of applications (SODA) – and the collaboration issues between business and IT analysts – I find that there remains considerable confusion concerning the term “service”. On one hand the business users speak at both coarse-grained [...]

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What’s on my mind today is the Open Service Oriented Architecture (OSOA) specification on Service Component Architecture (SCA), "Assembly Model Specification Extensions for Event Processing and Pub/Sub" and the possible confusion concerning how this relates to design and assembly of software and data services from a service-oriented applications development (SODA) perspective. They are related, [...]

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