Recent Posts by Bob Rhubart

Bob Evans, writing on InformationWeek's CIO Uncensored Blog, offers this advice to CIOs: Recently uncovered fossil records indicate that the tattered cliché of "CIOs must align IT with the business" was first uttered shortly after the discovery of fire. And while that bromide made sense for a few thousand years, it no longer applies here in the early 21st century because today's mandate for CIOs must be to align IT with their *customers*, not with their business. Because one...

Blog: State of the SOA Union Assessing the state of SOA, Bradley D. Brown observes that "we're beyond the early adaptor phase and we're into the mainstream at this point. Yet, about 1/2 of the organizations in the world haven't even started an SOA project." (tags: soa xml webservices shortcut:soa)

Blog: SaaS for Techies (Antony Reynolds' Blog) Antony Reynolds describes SaaS as "all about providing a useful function to the customer without the customer being concerned about it is delivered. In that sense it is SOA taken taken to the next level." (tags: saas soa cloud)

Blog: Obama's Vision For A CTO - Political Tech Blog - InformationWeek K. C. Jones reports that "members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team have indicated that the CTO will be a Cabinet-level post and advisers said several Cabinet members will likely be named by the end of the month." (tags: obama CTO usgovernment) Blog: Event Processing in Enterprise Operations Perren Walker "examines event processing in enterprise operations and how BI, BAM and BPM complement...

One of the standout presentations at last week's Defrag Conference was Jonathan Yarmis's  Data, Data Everywhere. Yarmis's presentation offered some truly astonishing statistics about the sheer volume and explosive growth of data in an increasingly connected world. His talk also touched on the impossibly challenging task of panning for gold in the rushing whitewater of the datastream.  Fortunately, Yarmis's presentation is available on SlideShare, so you can see for yourself,...

Blog: Standards Reduce Integration Costs David Dorf interviews Richard Halter, enterprise architect for the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). (tags: soa standards xml integration) Blog: Don't Give Up (on SOA) Saul Cunningham asks, "Why does Europe find SOA compelling while Asia takes a much more cautious stance? Do the reasons for not up-taking SOA (lack of skills and lack of business case) have any relationship to the financial crisis? Or do they have more to do...

Blog: The Role of BPM in SOA Governance (SOA Governance@work) Mike Stamback discusses how BPM "provides a means to structure the governance process and automate enforcement of policies and procedures to ensure business/IT alignment and compliance." (tags: bpm soa soagovernance) Blog: Maximum Availability Architecture: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Steven Chan highlights OpenWorld 2008 presentations that cover some of the most popular E-Business Suite technology stack topics. (...

My previous post, written in haste early this morning under a serious caffeine deficiency, didn't quite do justice to William Duggan's presentation during Monday's keynote.  I'd like to rectify that situation... Duggan asserted that the whole right brain/left brain thing is hooey, and that innovation is the product of intuition and analysis. He also observed that great artists -- and other innovators -- steal. The point isn't about intellectual thievery, but rather about...

The Defrag Conference 2008 website describes the event as "the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the 'social' aspect of software."  A modest event, drawing what I would guess to be 300 to 400 people, it nevertheless deals with what is arguably the dominant issue in the complex and evolving relationship between people and technology: Social computing.  While the importance of SOA, virtualization, XTP, grid computing, and the like...