http://blog.gartner.com/blog/aiws2006.php?x=0 Application Development and Integration en-us Nucleus CMS v3.41 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://blog.gartner.com/blog/aiws2006.php?x=0blog/nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://blog.gartner.com/blog/aiws2006.php?x=0 If You Had an Application Strategy presented by Andy Kyte to get a better idea of what is (and isn't) strategic. Another key to smart budget cutting is to understand your current set of applications, which Jim Duggan covers in a number of sessions on application porfolio management (APM) and Application: How to Achieve Success with APM, Best Practices in APM, APM: The First Step for IT Modenization.
I will highlight additional cost restructuring techniques and sessions in future posts...]]> General Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:24:08 -0500 IT and The Economy.
This got me thinking about how tough economic times will affect one of the central themse of the AADI Summit - SOA. My inclination is that many of you will be asked to put more meat behind your business cases and re-confirm that SOA efforts are worth pursuing in a time of tighter budgets. In some cases, the answer will actually be that SOA efforts should be put on hold, but in most cases that would be a big mistake. I would urge all of you to check out Anthony Bradley's session entitled Finding the Value in SOA, which tackles this discussion head on with some phenominal advice backed up by a very powerful tool.]]> General Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:37:55 -0500 Author: Pascal Winckel, Senior Director, Gartner

One of our attendees’ favorite way to network with their peers onsite is the Analyst User Roundtables. The idea is simple: one hour, one topic, one analyst moderating, and a dozen user attendees who share their experience, challenges and successes in a group discussion. We have 25 Roundtables this time, covering topics related (or complementary to) the analyst sessions on the agenda.

This year we are also adding another new twist – community roundtables – where users get to choose the topic and a user attendee co-leads the session. If you have a topic you would like to see covered in a roundtable (that you don’t see in the Analyst User Roundtable line up) or you would like to lead a roundtable, please send your suggestions to me.

Because of the limited size, these roundtables often "sell out" very quickly, so I highly recommend you register early (follow the link and sign into Agenda Builder to register for your selected AURs!).

Here’s the list...organized in a few broad categories.

Application Management & GovernanceHow to Achieve Success with Application Lifecycle Management – Jim Duggan
Best Practices in SOA Testing and Quality – Tom Murphy
Outsourcing Applications Development: What Works – What Doesn’t? – Joseph Feiman
Best Practices in Managing Customization of Packaged Applications – Andy Kyte
Managing the Application Team’s Staffing and Skillsets: What Works? What Doesn’t? – Susan Landry
Best Practices in Application Portfolio Management – Jim Duggan
Application and SOA Governance: Dos and Don'ts – Matt Hotle

SOA
Best Practices in Justifying SOA Investments – Paolo Malinverno
Best Practices in Service-Oriented Development – Michael Blechar
Organizing for SOA: Roles and Responsibilities – Paolo Malinverno
Leveraging BPM and SOA – Jim Sinur
Managing the Data Side of SOA: Dos and Don'ts – Marc Beyer
How to Implement a SOA Infrastructure: ESBs, Appliances, Flow Managers etc. – Massimo Pezzini
Best Practices in Using SOA Governance Technologies – Frank Kenney
Best Practices for B2B SOA – Benoit Lheureux
Advanced Practices: Making the Most of Event Processing and Event Driven Architecture – Roy Schulte

Modernization
Legacy Modernization Through SOA: What Works? What Doesn't? – Dale Vecchio
Mainframe Migration: When and How to Do It? – Dale Vecchio
When and How to Adopt Open Source Software – Mark Driver

Web/Cloud
Best Practices in Implementing SOA With Web Oriented Architecture – Dan Sholler
Lessons Learned in Enterprise Mashups – Anthony Bradley
Next Practices: Getting Application Infrastructure Services From the Cloud – Yefim Natis
Next Practices: Developing and Running Applications In the Cloud – David Cearley
Lessons Learned in Integrating Software-as-a-Service in Your Application Portfolio – Ben Pring
]]> General Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:45:48 -0500 Author: Pascal Winckel, Senior Director, Gartner

You’ve heard it so many times by now - SOA success isn’t primarily about technology, it’s about process, organization, culture and people. So issues like how you pick the right people, how you make the most of your teams, how you promote excellence and change are crucial. We are pleased to announce a keynote that will help and guide our audience with some of these questions. Renowned author Malcolm Gladwell, of “Tipping Point” and “Blink” fame, is out with a brand new book this November (“Outliers”) and has agreed to present the closing keynote of the Summit, drawing from his new and earlier work to show how to step outside of formal organizational hierarchies and leverage social and psychological dynamics to create powerful movements for change and success.

Here’s the kicker: If you attend his keynote, you get his latest “Outliers” book for free, and you can even get it signed by the author!

]]> General Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:01:26 -0500 Author: Pascal Winckel, Senior Director, Gartner

We’ve just posted all the session titles and descriptions of the December Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, taking place Dec 8-10 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (co-located back to back with the Enterprise Architecture Summit).

For the 21st edition, we’ve revamped the agenda to provide even more relevant advice to our audience. There are two major themes this time: SOA and modernization. No big surprise there - SOA remains the elephant in the room for most architects and application teams today, and it is (or should be) part of a broader strategy to modernize legacy systems and bring on new generation application development practices that deliver value and competitive advantage.

What’s really new is that we’ve structured the SOA content according to the different levels of maturity. As SOA goes mainstream, there is a growing diversity in the level of experience and sophistication that our past attendees wanted us to address. So we created three dedicated tracks that essentially deliver SOA 101, 201 and 301.

The remaining two tracks cover modernization, either from the perspective of making the most of your legacy environments, or from the standpoint of building a 21st century application environment.

A few other new themes and “virtual tracks" include B2B & Multienterprise, Governance, and Web2.0/SaaS/Cloud.

More detail in later post as we highlight specific content, analysts, and give sneak previews of some of the presentations being developed. In the meantime, you can go to the event site and check out the PDF of the tracks and sessions or build your own agenda.]]> General Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:55:10 -0500 Author: Bruce Robertson, Research VP

Everyone has patterns in their EA work. For my "ETA Patterns: A Practitioner's Guide" presentation this afternoon at 4:15, I hope to tease out different kinds of patterns, then zero in on the kind that is focused on the complete set of technical parts that are needed for common application platforms. Such end-to-end blueprints are useful. But, they aren't easy to create or use after you've created them.

What I want to do is make sure EA teams keep in mind when doing this kind of work is how important it is to think about the team you set up to do the modeling and how you manage that effort. If you're not careful, you end up with ETA patterns that no one really wants to use. The role of the EA or ETA lead for such teams must be to define a representative team, define a reasonable and well understood project plan, then manage these models over time like any other standard: with life cycles and upgrade paths. In working with many clients, I've found a few key things can make a big difference in success.

Join me to see what those are, and share some of your own.
]]> General Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:47:00 -0500 Author: Betsy Burton, Research VP

I had the opportunity on Wednesday to present Gartner's new thinking and new research on enterprise business architecture (EBA). Gartner defines EBA as that part of the EA process that describes - through a set of requirements, principles and models - the future state, the current state, and the guidance necessary to flexibly evolve and optimize business dimensions (the people, processes, financials and organizations) to achieve effective enterprise change. The critical change is the inclusion of the new dimensions.

The goal of defining EBA is to ensure that changes and enhancements to business functions, process, financials, people and organizational structure are fully optimized along with information and technology, in support of the business strategy. During the session, I received several, very interesting questions about the role of business architects, and asking for EBA artifact samples. During this session I referenced several research notes and toolkits that I thought might be interesting to those of you focused on EBA.

"Understand Enterprise Business Architecture to Realize Your Future State"

"Toolkit: Bank XYZ Business Anchor Model"

"Provide Appropriate Support Based on Impact Segmentation"


"Person-to-Process Interaction Emerges as the 'Process of Me'"

"Recognize the New Stakeholder: The Individual"

"CIOs and IT Leaders: Prepare for the 'Pull' Mind-Set of Consumer IT"

"Gartner Enterprise Architecture Framework: Evolution 2005"
]]> General Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:10:00 -0500 Author: Richard Buchanan, Managing VP

During my presentation, "Building an Effective EA Team," I received a number of questions regarding the relationship of the core EA team to other related teams. Please review this graphic and note the following comments, by way of explanation:

A complementary set of five chartered roles needs to be played to bridge the gap between forward business strategy and supporting technical implementation. If roles are defined, many types of organization charts will suffice, but if people are unsure as to their roles, no organization chart will save you. (1) C-level executives should be "stratospherically" focused on the forward strategy. Contrast this with (2) Technical or Domain Architects tasked to create re-usable services, that (3) Solution Architects or project teams assemble together as business solutions. (4) The IT Portfolio Managers must determine (A) What to architect (that has business value)?, and (B) What sequence to execute IT solutions in? For these two problems, the Portfolio Managers require (i) A theory of the business, and (ii) a future technical state description. These two things (i and ii) are the output of (5) The Core Enterprise Architecture Team.

With regard to the charter of the core EA team, I should note the following: One of the first deliverables for the architecture team is the enterprise architecture (EA) program charter. This document specifies the scope, objectives, deliverables and governance structure for the architecture program. The purpose is to gain agreement with the executive steering committee on the mandate for the EA program, empowering the EA program to design and oversee the evolution of the architecture.

Those programs that continue to function without a charter will always be deemed failures (by at least some portion of the constituency). Simply stated, the architecture program charter is an agreement among the architecture team, its sponsors and key stakeholders that specifies what, how and when things will be done - and by whom. Without this agreement, the architecture team exposes itself to criticism (founded or unfounded) and has no means to defend itself. ]]> General Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:08:53 -0500 Author: Bruce Robertson, Research VP

As I am reviewing for my presentation today on "Defining and Managing your Technical Architecture" at the EA Summit, I was struck by the realization that things are just too complex in technology. Most of us have models of many kinds – and that's NOT the problem with our ETA. Instead, the problem is that people aren't paying attention to any of that content. This is why I hope to highlight a few key points:

1) Keep it simple, less is more: Use single-slide versions of what your conceptual guidance is (keep the "why" info separate)
2) Integrate with key processes (especially the SDLC) and sell / market to relevant stakeholders

So come join me and put on your marketing hat for a while!
]]> General Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:47:08 -0500 David Norton mentioned to me that one thing you can guarantee at a Gartner event is you will come away with a new idea. That's especially true for we as analysts. For example, he covers agile methods, which he discussed in his Agile Software Project Management session and in a Practitioner's Guide on How To Make Waterfall Agile that he co-presented with Matt Hotle. He is often asked "can everything be iterative?" Well, this week one of our clients gave him the answer – pretty much yes.
The client works in the space industry - a very traditional, hard-engineering domain. David was amazed to hear how the client's company was starting to design and deploy satellites iteratively. Can you launch a satellite in increments? – well apparently you can. You start with a core module and then fire up bolt-ons as you need them. You add functionality as you need it and throughout the life of the satellite. What does this have to do with IT, you may ask ? First, it demonstrated that any problem can be partitioned into "chunks" of functionality that have value. Second, it shows that even high-risk domains can benefit from agile practices. It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's an iteratively delivered satellite! ]]> General Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:37:10 -0500