Paying to stay dumb

Today I came across an article about students (most IT-related) who "outsource" their work (even complete dissertations) to India and Romania. Students contract their work to the lowest bidder.

Question: who are the smartest? The ones who try to pay as little as possible to not getting educated? Or the ones who get payed a little while enhancing their skills?

Question 2: who will eventually rule the world? The ones that build skills or the ones that leave the opportunity to learn?

How stupid can you be!

"Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects"

In this video presentation (Silverlight) Pat Helland demystifies the near future of Information Technology. Whether it concerns the evolvement of processor chips, software or data centers, Pat aptly and pleasantly explains what we can expect in the next couple of years.

The video was recorded at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona last November (2007). I personally enjoyed the honor to attend the same presentation by Pat Helland at the Microsoft campus in Redmond last January (2008) as final part of the Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP), which Microsoft offers to Enterprise Architects in the Netherlands.

Believe me, Pat is cool! Pat is very very cool!

[Click the picture]


Powerpoint, video and MP3 are available for download (I watched the video on my iPod in the train traveling to work).

SOA and business applications

I recognize some ambiguity with regard to "business applications". In my model business applications might be defined as software algorithms with focus on supporting business processes. I agree that SOA and EDA are architecture patterns. But I disagree it is not about business applications. In my opinion - from a real life perspective - these architecture patterns strongly focus on how to apply a software based layer to support the business processes. And so being part of the business applications at the same time as being - more idealistic - an approach to shape the business processes.

The same applies to BPM as a means of how to shape business processes (horizontally) AND how to link the business processes to the software layer (vertically). In real life BPM is synonymous with standards based tooling to shape business processes and which spawns BPEL (software algoritms) to execute the processes in an IT-environment and thus being some kind of business application itself.

And also CEP - closely related to BAM - has everything to do with software based algorithms to support business processes by correlation (software based representations of) business events. And thus belonging to the business application layer IMHO.

In short: I tend to view the whole picture, business and IT, and not only one of them. I consider the business application layer as the IT counterpart of the business process layer. Even a fully automated business process has in essence a business perspective and an IT perspective. Viewing it this way might clear some of the potential and understandable mystifications.

I realize that juggling between those two worlds has been my profession for over 30 years already... and nowadays it's more exciting than ever before.