bookmarks  8

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    IBM Rolls Out 'Event Processing' Roadmap, Goes After Business Agility
    16 years ago by @cschie
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    Maximize Business Value through Right-Time Information Using Data Services
    16 years ago by @cschie
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    There is, or should be, a distinction between adaption and agility. Adaption – minor change - can be seen as an entire range of small changes that you undertake to increase effectiveness and/or efficiency, from substituting one piece of equipment for another (or using bailing wire and bubblegum to fix something) through to adjusting tactical and even operational methods. It is the later which is of prime interest with respect to agility, this being a mindset (or intellectual outlook) that allows, as Rob says, to better and more quickly identify changes in the environment and exploit the opportunities that occur as a result or at least adjust to minimize the adverse consequences. An example that Rob and I discussed was the mental agility to recognize and seize appropriately the opportunity afforded by some Sunni insurgent groups turning against al Qaeda in Iraq (Cavguy – I think it was he - and Kilcullen have both discussed this on SWB) and then adaptation was to be able to transfer the basic model to other areas while adjusting the model appropriately to fit the local situation and circumstances (and yes, recognizing different circumstances and adjusting the model falls under agility as well). So, another, and perhaps better, way to think about the difference between adaptability and agility is that adaptation is the ability to react to obvious change and/or problem, while agility is the capacity to discern change and, more important, its implications, so that you are able to anticipate and act in an anticipatory manner (preferably appropriately). Rob’s boxer analogy captures this. Turning to innovation, methinks my beers’ explanation was only partial. So allow me to elaborate. Innovation, as I as an academic define it, is major change in aims, strategies (ways of warfare), and/or structure. As an example, institutionalizing maneuver warfare is a major change (operational way of warfare), and as such has implications for the other two main aspects noted earlier as well as throughout an organization and for resources. (So, I would guess that davidfpo's obervation about change in LE would in my definition be 'adaptation') Where my beer probably mis-explained was in the context of what Rob and I were talking about – institutionalizing IW or Complex IW (or hybrid warfare, if you will – a mix of conventional and unconventional [ie, Hezbollah, summer 2006]) as a core competency of the US military (or specific services, if you prefer). A key element of developing a CIW competency, for the US military (and I concur with this) is agility and adaptability. So, in the context of this, Rob’s observation ‘“Innovation” as the steps taken to create and sustain the broader climate or atmosphere in which “Adaptation” takes place’ is correct, as ‘part’ of institutionalizing CIW. The effort to implement and institutionalize CIW will, in part, involve creating and sustaining a broader climate or atmosphere (or to be academic, organizational culture) through persuasion (narratives), education and training (behavior), in which mental agility can be fostered, and to the degree that it is fostered this will improve adaptability. Fostering improved mental agility and/or agility in and of itself would not constitute major change or innovation, even though it would be organizationally very useful, rather in the context of Rob’s and my conversation it is an important component of implementing CIW which would be a major change or innovation. Of course, fostering agility is not easy (agility takes experience, education, training, and so on and so forth), and nor should we expect that every enlisted, NCO and/or officer will be agile, for human nature is such that some people tend to be more mentally agile than others. It seems to me that to develop agility you need to start right in enlisted and officer ‘boot camp’, whereas my limited, ‘book based’, understanding of ‘boot camp’ is that part of the training /socialization process is to inculcate ‘obedience to command’ (among a host of other attributes), which I suspect works to rigidify thinking (but I am guessing on this observation). How one balances a desire for mental agility with the necessity of ‘obedience to command’ is beyond my competence and I leave this to the psychologists and sociologists (and anthropologists? and ?) to mull over.
    15 years ago by @cschie
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    Based on feedback from clients and earlier surveys, I have compiled and listed the benefit themes below: Business Agility: Faster reactive and proactive time to market Decision Making: Test rule-based scenarios at lower cost Revenue Opportunities: Greater product, pricing and  flexibility Customer Satisfaction: More-customizable products and services Compliance; Greater visibility into policy adherence
    15 years ago by @cschie
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    However I don't think this is the key point about agile methods. Lack of documentation is a symptom of two much deeper differences: Agile methods are adaptive rather than predictive. Engineering methods tend to try to plan out a large part of the software process in great detail for a long span of time, this works well until things change. So their nature is to resist change. The agile methods, however, welcome change. They try to be processes that adapt and thrive on change, even to the point of changing themselves. Agile methods are people-oriented rather than process-oriented. The goal of engineering methods is to define a process that will work well whoever happens to be using it. Agile methods assert that no process will ever make up the skill of the development team, so the role of a process is to support the development team in their work.In the following sections I'll explore these differences in more detail, so that you can understand what an adaptive and people-centered process is like, its benefits and drawbacks, and whether it's something you should use: either as a developer or customer of software.
    15 years ago by @cschie
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    Sandy Carter IBM VP, SOA, BPM and WebSphere Marketing
    15 years ago by @cschie
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    The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture, Software as a Service, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.
    15 years ago by @cschie
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publications  4  

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