tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44499979912636402442012-02-10T10:43:03.902-08:00Ramblings - And hopefully something interesting from time to time - Or at least something intriguing <p> Also blogging on Carole-Ann Matignon's <a href="http://www.techondec.wordpress.com"> <b><u>TECHs on Decision Management</u></b></a></p>ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.comBlogger321100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-39699385345280771182011-10-19T20:38:00.000-07:002011-10-19T20:45:10.054-07:00

There has been a significant upsurge of discussions around the "agile" software development approach (as ill-defined as that may be). A backlash of sorts… Not surprising - I have yet to meet a software development approach that does not go through the typical cycle of discovery, dismissal, early adoption, enthusiastic adoption, boredom, discussion, rejection, obsolescence. The proponents of these

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-26220589784464741162010-02-21T18:17:00.000-08:002010-02-21T18:28:31.652-08:00

Carole-Ann wrote a blog about what she considers to be the #1 pitfall in the implementation of proper Decision Management applications. Her observations are based on a vast experience of multiple implementations of such applications in multiple vertical domains.I fully agree with Carole-Ann’s position highlighting the importance of getting the user interface for business analysts well defined and

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-79806972118628188812010-01-26T11:14:00.000-08:002010-01-26T11:17:50.285-08:00

Those of you who follow this blog (or know me) know that I am quite passionate about decision management, and have essentially articulated the past decade of my professional career around the many problems it requires us software and analytic people to solve.One key issue that keeps bugging me is the lack of support in the academic world for decision management as a full blown discipline

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-54712369097541962262010-01-25T19:37:00.000-08:002010-01-25T20:32:37.628-08:00

I just finished reading "Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life", by John H Miller and Scott E Page. Interesting book, dealing with problems that are dear to me, although from a fairly different perspective from the one I am used to.I come to this from the angle of decision management. As Carole-Ann Matignon writes in her blog, a lot of developments are

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-64590731737779982222010-01-06T15:15:00.000-08:002010-01-06T15:18:13.651-08:00

I have recently spent some time looking at LINQ-to-SQL to see whether there would be an opportunity to benefit from it and replace things like NHibernate which I am used to. The best result of that effort was the discovery of PLINQO provided by the CodeSmith team you may be familiar with.Before reading the rest of this short post, check them out: www.plinqo.com (and take also a look at

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-54961308650294339022009-11-10T08:35:00.000-08:002009-11-10T10:21:29.352-08:00

I spent the last few weeks attending a number of conferences. That gave me an excellent opportunity to talk to customers, discuss with prospects, get an updated view on the industry and the competition.I also got the opportunity to attend a number of interesting presentations. In particular, at Business Rules Forum (http://www.brforum.com), I attended a peer discussion hosted by Paul Haley (http:

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-44744700290016912522009-10-20T05:53:00.000-07:002009-10-20T05:55:01.331-07:00

I have not blogged for a while… Too much work, too much involvement in too many decisions with too little time and information. Pretty mind-numbing work.But it’s time for me to make some of my neurons and synapses to work.During last couple of weeks, Carole-Ann (www.edmblog.com, www.twitter.com/cmatignon) attended the Gartner BPM summit. One of the key things she conveyed was a fair amount of

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-49332524494165329222009-03-04T08:55:00.000-08:002009-03-04T11:33:24.571-08:00

WSJ has this interesting series demystifying - or at least discussing - issues around numeracy, probabilities, and the corresponding impact.I just read the following: http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/the-crash-calculations-621/A couple of key things that I feel are not really covered deeply enough:- the quality, and ultimately the validity of predictions in a given context are a direct function of

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-41626153294324689232009-02-23T02:07:00.001-08:002009-02-23T02:22:20.286-08:00

The move to "netbooks" and other always connected devices seems to finally be here to stay - it's been talked for a while, but the convergence of technology and economics to make it a reality is now with us.There is a very interesting article in Wired (if I remember well) that chronicles the "strange" history of the new generation of "netbooks": how something that was created to address the needs

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-47670602565602428912009-02-06T21:01:00.000-08:002009-02-06T21:21:42.486-08:00

It's not in my nature to spend a lot of time reading management books. I do, however, have a real interest in books that deal with the decision making (or frequently decision avoidance) process in organizations. Issues in decision making are at the confluence of many disciplines, which fascinates me. Furthermore, my professional career has been devoted to software tools supporting decision

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-75185047101767172352009-01-08T19:48:00.000-08:002009-01-08T20:28:53.507-08:00

Well, this is certainly going to be "duh"-obvious, but it's clear that we are entering the year of The Cloud. The rapid-fire succession of announcements from major players of one or another form of cloud offering is not just the result of flock mentality or boredom early in the year: it's a symptom of the relevance the cloud has reached.Why now?- A first reason is the current crisis. On each and

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-21963508869476510582009-01-03T23:02:00.000-08:002009-01-04T22:39:43.953-08:00

The NYT just published an interesting analysis of the role played by modern financial models in the current meltdown [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html?_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=all]. The article highlights the particular role played by VaR models and the institutionalized and improper reliance on that kind of models.I have blogged about this in the

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-61298454005105978502008-12-22T17:22:00.001-08:002008-12-22T17:30:23.652-08:00

I have been reading a little about what is being presented as the causes for the current worldwide financial crisis. Nothing really surprising in the descriptions, of course, we’ve all heard or read these experts who failed to predict anything going to great details in explaining a posteriori what happened, and provide supposedly valuable insight into what would be coming.What really amazes me is

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-26220856670904292652008-12-15T12:56:00.000-08:002008-12-16T00:34:32.220-08:00

A little late in noticing this: CouchDB has become a first class citizen project of Apache [http://couchdb.apache.org/].This is an interesting development. For us, enterprise application folks, it takes a while to get rid of the relational paradigm and bring ourselves to consider a document-oriented database such as this one. But I have to say that years of squeezing documents into the relational

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-51422687548396338782008-12-14T13:49:00.000-08:002008-12-14T14:22:02.825-08:00

As usual, tough to drop a subject once you start thinking about it.A couple of things I did not go into in my previous post on search [http://architectguy.blogspot.com/2008/12/search-questions.html] that I think are relevant to the discussion:- The reputation system needs to be made contextual (yes, here it comes again). The computation of the reputation for a given document needs to take into

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-16464414204896136502008-12-14T10:55:00.000-08:002008-12-17T16:29:35.489-08:00

Virtually attending LeWeb08, I got to listen to a presentation by Marissa Meyer on the future of search [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/10/marissa-mayer-at-le-web-the-almost-complete-interview/].Of course, I know very little about search, but somehow, I find the idea that personalization will be core to the future of search controversial, in a good way.First, I doubt the personalization of

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-72543057374531014582008-12-05T22:59:00.000-08:002010-05-13T22:31:45.244-07:00

One of the benefits of being part of the Twitter craze is that you see real time what interests people you find interesting. Similar principle as other older services, but for some reason I can still not figure out, more effective.My attention was drawn to a fascinating article written for Vanity Fair by William Langewiesche. Langewiesche is an interesting writer/journalist. I had previously read

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-5552154196495074142008-12-01T01:47:00.000-08:002008-12-04T00:53:42.981-08:00

Here we go: http://www.informationweek.com/news/business_intelligence/bpm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212200753&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Business_IntelligenceIBM launches an attempt to define the "Business Event Management" space. This plays directly into all the controversies around CEP and its overlap and positioning with respect to other spaces such as "Business Process Management" or "Business Rules

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-79440049125941795252008-11-24T15:55:00.000-08:002008-12-23T12:30:04.339-08:00

Following up on the previous post [http://architectguy.blogspot.com/2008/11/map-reduce-relevance-to-analytics.html], and after some more quality time with google, it's clear that there is more activity around the extension of map-reduce to large scale analytics than I originally thought or knew about.Joe Hellerstein has published in O'Reilly Radar an interesting post on this exact subject [http:/

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-39238809201938813112008-11-23T22:30:00.000-08:002008-11-24T03:38:49.046-08:00

One of the key problems we face when dealing with vast numbers of events and/or vast amounts of data is how to efficiently parallelize the processing so as to accelerate the analytic development cycles. This is not just a question of efficiency (minimize the downtime of high cost PhD resources, ...) but also a question of feasibility (make the development of the analytics fit in business driven

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-79030075648051397422008-11-21T01:37:00.000-08:002008-11-21T10:29:19.656-08:00

Not being able to sleep much has its small rewards... such as having time to spend in seemingly futile brain teasers, mind games and other "exercises" that, maybe because of the general exhaustion, I find quite amusing.I was listening to a few old recordings by Boby Lapointe, a 50s-60s French singer, master of clever alliterations and plays on words. For some reason the lyrics of "Ta Katie t'a

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-7243504282167189952008-11-20T12:02:00.000-08:002008-11-26T10:51:52.658-08:00

Obviously, the CEP / BRMS / BPM / boundaries debate remains hot and continues provoking soul searching.My previous post on the this was a long (and complicated in the way it was phrased) ranting around the fact that CEP attempts to cover too many areas of the EDM picture, and at the same time does not do a deep enough job at solving the challenges around its core contribution - events as first

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-52585223623814241972008-11-11T21:56:00.000-08:002008-11-20T12:25:24.768-08:00

CEP Over the recent few months, the EDM world I work in has seen a lot of noise generated by the arrival of CEP - "Complex Event Processing" - and the impact it has had in terms of provoking soul searching in the BRMS and, to a lesser extent the EDA, ESP and other E(x)(x) worlds.The "E" in these E(x)(x) is "events" which are of course at the core of CEP.But so is "complex" and "processing", both

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-50811811956122940522008-11-06T01:43:00.000-08:002008-11-24T18:48:14.432-08:00

This is interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/world/americas/28cybersyn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=americas&pagewanted=print and http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chileVery interesting for me since I work in decision management, and Chile is where I come from. I had seen mentions of this in the past (hence my sudden recollection of it during this sleepless night

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-50653179538780145882008-11-05T23:22:00.000-08:002008-11-06T00:29:43.389-08:00

I am spending time getting a hold of the new approaches on programming languages.Many years ago, I discovered Bentley's Programming Pearls (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-ACM-Press/dp/0201657880/ref=sr_11_1/176-0790589-8960217?ie=UTF8&qid=1225956297&sr=11-1). I have true love for well defined "little languages" that have a clear purpose and deliver it with elegance, concision.I was

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-5501060491122471962008-11-04T10:40:00.000-08:002008-11-04T10:58:25.571-08:00

After a long absence from the blog, I am back to it.I have spent a couple of months heads down focusing on management issues, most of them consequences of the way my current employer has chosen to face the current crisis. Typical 'protect the EPS' reaction.I posted earlier on the counter-cyclists, and the reasons why it makes a lot of sense to manage good times better so that we can manage bad

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-55022613081129811452008-08-28T08:57:00.000-07:002008-11-04T15:02:00.180-08:00

I had never been a SciFi person in the past - but over the past two-three years a person who is very close to me have me discover it, and I have since been reading some of the best work there with my eldest son.I just finished Solaris and Fiasco by S. Lem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem). These are not as much SciFi as they are philosophical essays. Impressive work, and very good

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-60564139308526789552008-08-08T12:02:00.000-07:002008-08-08T12:26:23.662-07:00

As I was writing the previous post, it struck me that I was wondering about precisely what Borges covers in "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote".One message Borges delivers: the meaning of the literary text is more a function of the context (historical, cultural, etc) than it is of the text itself. Which means each reader creates the meaning of what he/she reads starting from what the author

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-31398236872571701892008-08-07T15:43:00.000-07:002008-11-04T15:05:41.930-08:00

I don't know what to make of this: [http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/].I have genuine respect and admiration for Orwell. Through his life, involvement and writings, Orwell represents a amalgam of many of those people on the left of the political spectrum who are genuinely touched by injustice, unfairness, have a realistic understanding of the world and are not swayed by rhetoric, and hold their

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-75326956944525076892008-08-06T10:36:00.000-07:002008-12-03T13:58:05.089-08:00

Sometimes you stumble on an article which for some reason just speaks to you. Just when you thought you had the perfect articulation of what you want to express in your head, you read how somebody has done it so much better...As mentioned earlier, my work is at an enterprise software vendor. Hit pretty hard by the current conditions. We are going, like many of our public peers, through the phase

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-27669327311390024912008-08-06T00:14:00.001-07:002009-01-21T21:14:12.580-08:00

The long debate...A lot has been said about this.Of course - usability is important. It reduces learning curves, it increases effectiveness, it increases sexiness. It increases appeal and reduces cost of ownership.But reality is more complicated than that, of course.Those who buy are not those who use, and the enterprise market builds for those who buy, guided by those who say what should be

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449997991263640244.post-67227568605377717902008-08-05T23:55:00.001-07:002008-08-08T12:24:35.796-07:00

Well, this is it. First steps in the blogosphere, which probably makes me a late-comer these days. Not the last thing I will be a late-comer to...This blog is intended to cover topics which attract my attention, for better or for worse, and which I think will be interesting to others. It will revolve mostly around technology and product issues - but it will sometimes bleed into more personal, and

ArchitectGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10813647798607537233noreply@blogger.com0