Nick Gall

My keynote at the Microsoft SOA and BP conference has generated a bit of press, including this excellent summary by Darryl Taft ("Gartner: How to Unify Your SOA Roll-Out") and this take on a quote from that article by Joe McKendrick ("Analyst: ‘you’ll all be doing SOA in 18 months whether you plan to or [...]

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I finally got around to reading Risk Management in the New York Times Magazine. It is one of the best articles on

Wall Street
Modeling
Risk
How people game models
How all models eventually fail

that I have ever read. It is must reading.
All risk management systems, all (complex) models for that matter, are examples of robust yet fragile systems: robust [...]

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Has social software really led us to this? According to the NY Times Bits blog, nearly 234,000 facebookers were defriended by their so-called friends looking to score a free hamburger. Burger King ran a promotion on Facebook that gave someone a coupon for a free hamburger if they would drop 10 friends. Harsh but hilarious.
Facebook [...]

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Just had to share a hilarious comic blog I just came across: SUPERUSELESS SUPERPOWERS. Here’s a sample that had me laughing so hard I cried:

Here’s the description:
SUPERUSELESS SUPERPOWER: In-flight flight
Being able to soar through the air still won’t save you from recycled oxygen and endless stories from complete strangers. Known as the "Cabin Sparrow," [...]

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I was surprised, I might even say astonished, to see that Gartner’s travel booking service (is it SaaS or just ASP?) Cliqbook is now listing the carbon footprint of each flight option it offers. Here is a screen shot:

Will this change my flying behavior? I doubt it; at least for the foreseeable future.
My first two [...]

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A colleague of mine was bemoaning the fact that despite the fact he had blogged on a particular topic, an internal Gartner email thread sprung up on the same topic instead of in the comments on his post. This despite the fact that he sent an email to the thread mentioning the post. But all [...]

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Recommended: http://blog.maxindelicato.com/2009/01/17-distributed-systems-and-web-scalability-resources.html

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Absolutely hilarious, and essential to any enterprise architect who wants to put naysayers in their place from the get go.
Warning –Use of the f’bomb: http://www.stickergiant.com/Charts-and-Graphs_d49.html

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Anne Thomas Manes has started the new year of with a bang by declaring: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services.
While I agree with many of the sentiments behind Anne’s declarations that “SOA is dead”, I disagree with her way forward: “long live services”.
It is services thinking, as conventionally understood, that led to the mess in [...]

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