Qapla'

Why start a new blog with the Klingon verb for success you may ask? Well, there is no such thing as coincidence. While attending the Cordial event at 'Kasteel de Vanenburg' in Putten I had an energizing discussion with a very interesting consultant/nerd/show man; Daryl Plummer (Group VP at Gartner). He ‘performed’ a fantastic presentation on the need for Service oriented architectures and its evolution to include event driven architectures. A technology presentation filled with human experiences, metaphors and lots of humour. When the phone rings, that is an event, when you pick it up you use a service to communicate with your neighbour who tells you that your dog is trying to eat their cat, which is an event. Your neighbours would probably consider it a service if you could prevent Butch from eating Fluffy. A beautiful and extremely funny way of describing the difference between a service and an event. He then went on explaining that day to day live is based on events first and on the choice you make regarding the service to deal with the event second. That is a concept that is near to my hart and part of what we are doing here. Networks are event driven and we want to empower people to not only ease the choice of service through the sharing of information and experience with others, but to empower them to build their own services to make their lives easier. Using his words, we want to compose networks by assembling the needed disciplines and orchestrate its direction (give it a self sustaining purpose).

I am not easily impressed, but this was an exception. In a meeting afterwards we discussed how we could enable business people to not only drive the development of new applications, but also make it so easy that they can develop simple event driven services for communication and collaboration without any coding knowledge. During the discussion the word Qapla' came up; I should have known he was also a 'Trekkie'. We do not only share the same view on the use of technology, but we also share a love for all things Star Trek (with the possible exception of Enterprise which they cancelled when it finally began to show some promise). We also both laugh ourselves silly when it comes to the extreme lengths some people go through to dress as their heroes. We're plain clothes fans. There is no such thing as coincidence and I may just take him up on the invitation to visit the Dragoncon event in Atlanta next year in September.

When I look back on the two day Cordial, the meeting with Daryl and the presentation of Futurologist Paul Ostendorf on the first day including the resulting discussion together with Colby Stuart and Jonathan Marks where the highlights of the event. Paul gave us a video supported view on the future and role technology will play. He did this on his own presentation software which looked superior to Powerpoint in more ways than one. I will have to look into that on www.neoversum.com, I wonder if there was fruit involved. Colby already described his presentation and the resulting discussion in her blog, so read it here!

I also had a short discussion with the founder of Cordys (Jan Baan) on the topic Colby ended her blog on the Cordial with. Where is the human element? He was initially taken aback because he linked my question with the organisation of the event, so I rephrased my question to: How will people drive the development of applications and drive the role of applications in how they collaborate? To him their product is more about human beings than it has ever been. I think he meant that it is for the good of human beings working in organisations and using services because it reduces complexity, is easier to maintain, easier to build and hopefully easier to use, but that still did not answer my question. With a thank you for the invitation, that was the end of our discussion though.

Cordys is using the terms business collaboration and excellerate (excel and accelerate) on every corner. I see application integration through an enterprise system bus and an orchestrator that can be used to accelerate application development through process modelling. This will make the ICT architecture of any company more agile. Bravo! I do not see collaboration between people or a search for and nurturing of excellence though. These are human concepts that technology can enable, but not inspire or replace. While I am very impressed with their product offering I think Cordys has a challenge in that their staff is very homogenous, very technology driven with the exception of a few sales & marketing people. I see a company that is very good at technological innovation, but seems to lack the ability to innovate their business to make money. They still do things the nineties way. To close the gap between their technology prowess and the business need of their customers, they choose to partner with consulting oriented system integrators. In my opinion, these companies have the same problem as Cordys; they are not focused on adding the human being into the equation. The paradigm shift from technology driven development ‘here’s technology and this is how you must use it’ to user driven development ‘this is what I want to do, who will create the service?’ (think of blogging and tagging as an example) has not reached them yet. They will need to reinvent themselves or repeat the late nineties mistakes of many of their predecessors and become a takeover target within the next six months.