Tony van Büüren van Heijst

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it's "dead" or in the "trough of disillusionment." These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the number of organizations considering SOA, or that organizations have evaluated, but decided to shelve SOA for the time being. Or, even worse, that after an initial investment in implementing SOA architectures, organizations have been unable to capitalize on these investments. So, what's happening? What were these companies expecting and where did things go wrong? More importantly, can anything be done to put things back on track? Let's review the original promises of SOA and the most likely culprits in its perceived demise. And after all the doom and gloom, I'll suggest how practitioners can revive their SOA dr... (more)

7 reasons NOT to use Model Driven Development

Eric ten Harkel, founder and manager of COOLProfs, started this really insightful and humorous look at some provocative reasons a company shouldn't use Model Driven Development:  You want to hide behind technologyProducing hours is all that mattersMethodology over deliveryYour most important goal is management attentionYour marketing manager is color blindYou are not in the 21st century yetHigh productivity is a threat With over 23 years of model based development using Agile-like methods, Eric took a look at how the industry has evolved and outlined his thoughts on opportun... (more)

Introducing Agile: Hidden Benefits (and Some Challenges)

Our next presentation was by Stefan Meier, Associate Director, Software Development, Information Sciences Department at XDx. Xdx is a biotech company that relies on software and technology for their Molecular Diagnostic Technology. They assess patients who have had a heart transplant and whether they are likely to accept or reject the transplant. They are also working on a clinical study to provide the data to find correlations between genetics and pathology in disease/immune system-related areas. Prior to Agile & OutSystems - the development team was 5 developers and 2 SQA and... (more)

Key take-aways from this year's Forrester's IT Forum

Last week, I attended Forrester's IT Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.  In looking back over my notes I wanted to share some of the highlights.  The first keynote started off with the resounding words:  "Never Waste a Good Crisis".  Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester  expanded on this notion it appeared that the main point is that during a crisis change tends to be accelerated which should allow those savvy IT organizations to address these key challenges: •    How do I get leaner and reduce IT waste? •    How do I protect and promote innovation? •    How do... (more)

ITIL over OutSystems - Excellence and Agility for Turismo de Portugal

Hugo Sousa, IT Director of Turismo de Portugal, started out by sharing with the audience his commitment to the business goals of Turismo de Portugal. For that, he showed us his project goals:  Measure and get 90% satisfaction People are all that matters Do IT better This is a very important change in IT, where usually the metrics are measured in bandwidth and server uptime! Hugo pointed out that to do this IT Governance was a must. But because the rules can change and need to be adapted, Hugo stated that what he really needed was Agile IT Governance. After looking at several pr... (more)