Mad Greek Sightings

eBizQ MDM Roundtable Webinar

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I will be on a panel of distinguished analysts discussing the value of MDM (Master Data Management) on February 25, 2009 at noon EST. Join me, David Linthicum, and JP Morgenthal for this virtual conference. Click here for all of the details of this event.

Podcast: SOA and Change

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:19:00 +0000

Back in September I shared with all of you the presentation I gave about SOA and Organization Change Management. Today I am happy to share the podcast from that discussion that took place at the quarterly SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando. Here are the slides.

SOA & Change

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: soa change)

And here is the podcast that goes with it.

The panel discussion at the tail end of the presentation is fantastic. There were a lot of great questions and many lessons learned shared from experts like Todd Biske, Brenda Michelson, Fill Bowen from IBM, and others. If you have the time, listen to this podcast. Failure to recognize and counteract the resistance to change is the number one cause of failure for all enterprise initiatives, not just SOA.

Writing for BPMInstitute.org

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:23:00 +0000

My first article was published on BPMInstitute.org today. I have a quarterly commitment to write articles on BPM and SOA (SOAInstitute.org). This article was a case study on how CERN, an international scientific research company and pioneer of the world wide web, leveraged BPMS tools to improve efficiencies and control costs. You can read the article here.

Speaking at the AIIM Conference in Philly in March '09

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:26:00 +0000

I will be the co-presenter with colleague Jimmy Chou from Dominion Digital at the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia from March 30-April 2. I am not sure what day the presentation is yet. The topic will be Value-Driven BPM and SOA: Lessons Learned from a Leader in Behavioral-Based Marketing. We will be discussing a project that we both worked on and the process we went through to partner with the business and fund a large business process reengineering effort. This presentation will highlight a very successful effort for aligning technology with key business drivers that set the grounds for a major BPM/SOA initiative.

Speaking at an Executive IT Council for Information Week

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:21:00 +0000

I was invited to speak at a forum for IT executives in Detroit this week sponsored by Information Week. The purpose of the forum as described in the agenda goes like this...

This executive breakfast, specifically designed for senior business-technology executives, will explore why the pressure is on IT to help the business transform, and how it can meet those expectations. More than ever before, companies are demanding their CIOs to be strategic thinkers in helping them innovate and operate at peak performance - especially as businesses are under pressure from the poor state of the economy and the ever-faster pace of change in a global market. In this environment, you can't miss this opportunity to gain insight into the tactics and strategy that will help you be on your best game.

I was specifically asked to talk about why transformational IT initiatives like BPM & SOA fail and what advice I would offer to prevent failures from happening. I put together the following presentation which is a combination of some of my previous presentations, Preparing for SOA and SOA & Change.

Managing Change in a Business Transformation Environment

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: architecture governance)

I wrote a very popular article on CIO.com a while back about the Top 10 reasons why SOA fails. I speak to each of these points in the presentation and present solutions for each. I also discuss using John Kotter's 8-step process for managing change which I highlight in the presentation. Here are my keys for preventing failures.

Plan for and manage organizational change

Key drivers should be business focused not IT focused

Evaluate internal skills and fill gaps. Do not try it without help!

Don't let the vendors drive your architecture. Do your homework.

Grow your governance model over time

Speaking of governance, here is an analogy I like to use...

Implementing SOA without a solid governance model is the equivalent to having an airport without a control tower. Sure, there are some very good planes and talented pilots, but without the proper planning and timely information the end results would be disastrous. So make sure you build a control tower and hire some air traffic controllers!

If you would like me to create and present a custom presentation like this one, feel free to contact me

Speaking at the EDM Summit in Orlando

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:05:00 +0000

Tomorrow at 4pm I am presenting at the annual EDM Summit in Orlando on the topic of Business Intelligence as a Service. Check out the presentation below.

Bi As A Service 9 19 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: soa business)

This presentation is based on a real life project that I once worked on. We had a scenario where the business had a very complicated set of business rules required to determine what inventory was available to sell. Inventory for a loyalty marketing company is very dynamic and is not a physical thing like a widget. Instead it is a data mining exercise comprised of many "What-if" scenarios.

The old way of doing things was to get data from many different sources, some from systems, some from spread sheets, and some from somebody's head, and go through an ugly and error-prone process to determine what was available to sell. The process took many days which puzzled the customer why we couldn't tell them right away if we could run the program or not. Through some analysis, we defined new and improved business processes and data services that would allow our sales people to enter numerous parameters on a new web UI and let the systems return information to the screen with potential sales opportunities.

When the designers brought their solution to the architecture team for review we saw a huge opportunity to change the approach that was being recommended for the user interface. The designers were Java guys so naturally they recommended a Java web based UI (which infuriated the .Net community). But as I looked at the multiple screens that they story boarded it became obvious that building a what-if type UI was not best served by building proprietary code. Business Intelligence tools make a living doing just that. So I put a hold on the design and recommended that we brought in our BI partner for a proof of concept.

To make a long story short, we proved with our BI partner, that we could leverage the BI tool to create a robust what-if style GUI which we could talk to all of the layers of our SOA (see slides for details). In other words, we abstracted the BI tool as our presentation layer. What that gave us was all of the bells and whistles that come with BI tools like:

Flash enabled output
Subscription services
Mobile capabilities
Alerts
Great scalability
Logging
and much more

All of these things I mentioned above were out of the box features of the BI tool that we did not have to code in Java. In fact, we offered to the business a much more efficient solution. Instead of submitting data and reviewing rows on the screen, we offered to automate the business rules and allow them to subscribe to categories. This means that they only needed to go to the system to tell it what to look for and the system would alert them when categories were available. Now they could go into a sales meeting knowing in advance what was available to sell. When certain categories became available they could get an alert and immediately schedule a call to the appropriate customer. A future step could be to tie the alert into the CRM system.

So the key point to this story is that you can leverage BI as an abstracted layer within your SOA which will help maximize the value of your existing BI investment.

Soapbox Derby at the SOA Consortium

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:56:00 +0000

I will be participating in the SOA Sustainment Soapbox Derby at the SOA Consortium in Orlando on September 25, 2008. Here is the complete agenda for the 2 day event.

09:15 – 12:00 SOA Sustainment Soapbox Derby, SOA Practitioners
The purpose of the SOA Soapbox Derby is to allow practitioners to exchange ideas on activities that are critical to sustaining SOA success. Derby participants will have 10-15 minutes to soapbox, followed by another 15 minutes (or so) to engage in related conversation with meeting attendees.

Confirmed Soapbox Derby Participants:

• Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect, Monsanto
• Victor Harrison, Partner, CSC
• Mike Kavis, Chief Technologist / Independent Researcher
• David Miller, Embedded Software Engineer, Boeing
• Burc Oral, CTO, Cover4Me
Any practitioner attending the SOA Consortium meeting may participate in the 'SOA Soapbox Derby'. To participate, contact Brenda Michelson in advance, or onsite.

I will be discussing organizational change management as a critical success factor to a successful SOA implementation. I hope to see you there!

Blogging for CIO.com

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

I have been hired as a freelance blogger on CIO.com to write articles for their new section called the SOA Drilldown. Currently I am writing one post a week. Here are my first three blogs.

If you have any specific topics that are SOA related that you want me to discuss leave a comment or shoot me an email. Also, if you are a vendor or consulting firm and want to inform me of your products and services, I would be glad to give you 30 minutes to show me what you have.

Guest Blogger on ZDNet

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:34:00 +0000

I was asked by Michael Krigsman to be a guest blogger on his blog IT Project Failures on ZDNet. My post focused on IT Leadership as the main cause for most failures. Read the rest of the post here.

Podcast on ZDNet

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:04:00 +0000

I did a podcast with Michael Krigsman on his blog IT Project failures. We talked about SOA and how to prevent your SOA project from failing. You can read his commentary and listen to the podcast from Mike's post here.

KXAM Radio Interview about Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:30:00 +0000

Here is a recording of my radio interview on KXAM in Arizona. The interview was in response to a popular post I wrote called Microsoft Free - One year later.

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!

Analytics & SOA talk at EDM Summit

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:38:00 +0000

James Taylor and the good folks at Smart Enough Systems have invited me to speak at the first annual EDM Summit in Orlando. I will be discussing data, analytics, and SOA in a 20 minute segment. My team is currently working on what I call BI as a Service. We are abstracting our business intelligence tools in our presentation layer and allowing our customers to discover sales opportunities using Microstrategy. These sales opportunities are submitted by the customers which trigger events in the business process layer that start the proposal process guided by our BPMS tool.

I'll talk about BI as a Service and also discuss how we leverage complex algorithms written in SAS by our analytical services department and expose these as web services available for consumption by any other service or system. All this and more coming to Orlando in October.

If you are planning on attending drop me a note. I will be microblogging the conference on Twitter (assuming that Twitter is up).

Radio interview with Gutsy Geeks

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:32:00 +0000

This Wednesday, June 11, I will be live on the air with the good folks at gutsygeek.com. Apparently they liked my Microsoft Free - One year later article and want to hear more. This was by far my most popular blog of all times which had over 60K hits from Slashdot, over 10k from Stumbledupon, and over 103K hits overall!

You can catch the show live at 7pm MST, 9pm EST on 1310 KXAM in Arizona.

SOA Consortium Practitioner Panels at Gartner's AADI & EA Summits - June 11 & 13

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:48:00 +0000

On Wednesday, June 11 at Gartner's Application, Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, I will be joined by Todd Biske & Melvin Greer and will be talking about measuring the value of SOA.

See the post on EBizQ

The conference runs from June 9-11, 2008 and features controversial speaker Nick Carr. If you are attending Email me give me a shout

Interview on Stacksafe.com

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:43:00 +0000

I was recently interviewed by the good folks at Stacksafe about SOA and IT operations. You can go to their blog and see the transcript. For those of you not familiar with Stacksafe, here is a demo of their Test Center product.

In other news, I will be participating in a user panel called Measuring the Value of SOA at Gartner's Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit on June 11 in Orlando. I will be teamed up with fellow blogger Todd Biske and SOA author Melvin Greer. Here is the description of the user panel as described in the agenda:

In this session, several practitioners will share firsthand experience of justifying and measuring the value of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) activities: How to make the initial business case and continuously demonstrate the benefits? What metrics to use? What return on investment (ROI) to expect? What challenges have they encountered, and how did they overcome them?

For those of you attending, feel free to send me a tweet on Twitter or eMail so I can set aside some time to meet up and talk technology.

And finally, after nearly 13 years at my current job, I have made a bold decision to enter the job market and am seeking out companies that are looking to implement BPM, SOA, or Enterprise Architecture. I have enjoyed implementing these at my current job and would like to take all of those lessons learned that I frequently share with my readers and put them to use. If you know of anybody who needs help on these initiatives, I'd love to chat with them.

Selling SOA to the Business Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kavis) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:32:00 +0000

Here is my presentation from Zapthink's Practical SOA conference in New Jersey back on March 25. My topic was How to Sell SOA to the Business. My three key take aways:

Align SOA w/Business Drivers
BPM is the Killer App
Speak in Business Terms

Click this link and go to the 4th video (you must register on Zapthink...it's free)

Feel free to leave comments or send me your questions at mkavis@yahoo.com.