Neil Ward-Dutton on IT-Director.com

IBM, Business Event Processing, and CEP: behind the bag of spanners

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:30:00 +0100

Earlier this week I attended an IBM press and analyst summit on the topic of Business Event Processing. To coincide with this, the company made some announcements on its BEP leadership, with over... [Read More...]

A new MWD FM podcast series: Software Delivery InFocus

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:43:00 +0100

After an extended hiatus, we're relaunching our podcasting efforts with a planned series of discussions focusing on the challenges and issues associated with software delivery processes and... [Read More...]

Businesses aren't machines, and enterprise architecture can't make them so

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:50:00 +0100

Via Service Oriented Enterprise, I recently picked up an Infoworld blog post by SOA journeyman David Linthicum, where he makes a couple of very strange points about SOA and ESBs. It may be, of... [Read More...]

Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:18:00 +0100

Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation came pretty much out of the blue a couple of... [Read More...]

Which comes first: process or service? Part 2

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:50:00 +0100

The question of how to combine BPM and SOA came up a lot here at TIBCO's TUCON user event - and, a little disappointingly, the standard response seems to typically revolve around reinventing the... [Read More...]

Which comes first: process or service? Part 1

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:55:00 +0100

Over the years I've been helping to run MWD I've been to quite a few events, talked to many enterprise IT folks and talked to many tech vendors, too - and one of the topics that comes up most often... [Read More...]

Linux: innovation platform or commoditising force?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:39:00 +0100

A few days ago Matt Asay wrote a piece on Linux's use on Wall Street in his Open Road blog. He recounted how one of the MDs from Bank of New York Mellon saw open source as the foundation of choice... [Read More...]

The lore of averages

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:45:00 +0100

I was chatting to a friend who's a top-notch Java developer over the weekend: we were shooting the breeze about Groovy, Rails, Spring, Hibernate and various other Things That Get People Excited... [Read More...]

Real-world Enterprise Architecture trends

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:53:29 +0100

This comes from Leo de Sousa, an EA in Australian Higher Education who asked the Shared Insights EA Network to provide ideas about what EA trends they were seeing. My take: leading organisations get... [Read More...]

BEA and Oracle and "caveat emptor"

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:36:00 +0100

As someone who wrote a little on the potential acquisition of BEA by Oracle, I've been in a quandary since the news of the acquisition broke: frankly, I felt that I needed to write something - but... [Read More...]

On not being subservient, part 2

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:03:39 +0100

Via Steve Jones, here's another story that perfectly encapsulates the power of realising that a partnership approach between IT and business can drive real improvements in the return that you... [Read More...]

SOA's five benefits in one picture

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:46:00 +0100

In recent discussions with one customer, I ended up drawing a series of little pictures to try and summarise the five potential benefits that can come from pursuing SOA. It seemed to work for them,... [Read More...]

On not being subservient

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:12:30 +0100

One of the the themes that came up time and time again in our interviews for the book was the importance of getting out of the mindset that the IT organisation is in existence to blindly serve... [Read More...]

Pure-play partnerships: helping light the way to BPM + SOA?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:50:00 +0100

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) players often talk about their ability to support BPEL, and this is often mistaken for BPM support. But BPEL is a misleading beast (as I've blogged about previously).... [Read More...]

Please don't hire a VP of SOA

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:50:00 +0100

This might sound like an odd title for a post, but I was prompted by this ZapThink ZapFlash, via the ever-watchful Todd Biske.The ZapThink note starts off talking about the challenges in SOA adoption... [Read More...]

Who do you put in a Centre of Excellence?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:20:00 +0100

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen throwaway comments exhorting companies to create a centre of excellence (CoE (mostly, for initiatives like SOA or BPM). Vendor / pundit / analyst /... [Read More...]

Ah yes, it's BPM... but which BPM is it?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:48:00 +0100

Arch BPM blogger-cum-analyst Sandy Kemsley references an interesting conversation she had with some webMethods customers at Software AG's Integration World event where the customers pooh pooh the BPM... [Read More...]

Google the new Microsoft? No comparison

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:55:00 +0100

...at least when it comes to discussion on the web. Google announced its OpenSocial social networking API project just 5 days ago - and now the company's own search engine reports over 7,700,000 hits... [Read More...]

Putting customers first?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:33:00 +0100

Most readers will by now be familiar with the recent sparring between Oracle and BEA (just see our del.icio.us links over the past days to get an... [Read More...]

Rethinking IT projects? Think service, not product, focus

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:01:00 +0100

I've read a number of articles and thought pieces recently that explore the problems with approaches to IT delivery that focus too much on projects as the organising concept - particularly when it... [Read More...]

Not just ink

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:00:00 +0100

For many many years in analyst circles, it was almost obligatory when talking about IT vendors to say well of course, HP makes all its profit from ink. I remember looking, year after year, at ... [Read More...]

On IT architecture and gardening

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:00:00 +0100

James Tarbell has this great post, responding to one of the people we've interviewed in our research, James McGovern. James T calls out some very insightful similarities between architects and ... [Read More...]

Two UK retailers decide to do without IT Directors

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:00:00 +0100

Just saw this story, courtesy of my colleague Martin Atherton (co-worker of book authors Jon Collins and Dale Vile). Martin asks: are these companies' IT departments moving from being ... [Read More...]

More big vs small thinking: SOA vs BPM

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 06:00:00 +0100

I was on the way back to the office from a briefing with BPM vendor Pegasystems yesterday, where we'd had an interesting discussion about the relative roles that BPM and SOA can play in business ... [Read More...]

Getting the right focus for IT Governance

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:45:00 +0100

I've long been a fan of Nick Malik's blog - and indeed it was his blog that led me to ask him if he'd be happy to be interviewed for the book. In this post Nick nails quite a few ... [Read More...]

IBM to buy Telelogic: Rational, but not inspirational

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:00:00 +0100

I know in the blogosphere, waiting a few days to provide comment on an announcement like this one hardly puts me at the leading edge - but ... [Read More...]

Turning IT inside out and the trouble with ITSM and BSM

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:20:00 +0100

The other day Martin Atherton over at our partner Freeform Dynamics got me thinking again about the IT ... [Read More...]

Swimming against the tide

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 30 May 2007 06:00:00 +0100

Nick Malik poses an interesting question here - are we making things difficult for ourselves ... [Read More...]

Real-world Enterprise Architecture part II: conversation, federation, road trips and tools

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 16 May 2007 06:00:00 +0100

In my previous post I explained how in order to get real value out of Enterprise Architecture (EA) work, it's critical to focus not only on the outputs of EA work, but also on the process/practice of ... [Read More...]

Real-world Enterprise Architecture part I: journey vs destination

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:00:00 +0100

I was talking to Donna Burbank, Director of Enterprise Modelling and Architecture Solutions at Embarcadero a few days ago - she was briefing me about the company's new EA/Studio product. [Read More...]