New Year's Resolutions
I'm sure that like me you will already have broken or conveniently forgotten your New Year's resolutions made in the foggy mist of Hogmanay. Back at work, having waded through all the emails sent by those people who have worked their way through Christmas and want you to know it, it is time to make some business resolutions for the year that will bring you fame and wealth - or at least ensure you keep your job.
Here are my top 5 cunning plans to help you:
1. Innovation. This year's big idea is innovation. From big-picture thought leadership down to better widgets designed and delivered to your customers. Companies are demanding that their managers be more creative and less obsessed with cost and efficiency. So take off pin-stripe suit, put on some shades - the future is looking bright!
2. Loosely-Coupled Thinking. Get away from the tired labels of BPM & SOA - the future is loosely-coupled. Push the flexibility of having loosely-coupled systems enabling loosely-coupled businesses to be much more agile to compete and succeed in the distributed world in which we now live.
3. Model-Driven Everything. It's not just processes or use cases that can (and should) be modelled. Graphical modelling tools and rich meta-data repositories allows us to now develop conceptual, logical and physical models of entire eco-systems, including people, process, data, systems, supply chains, etc.
4. Real-time Monitoring. Your lords and masters want more (management) information and (business) intelligence to make better and faster decisions. Enable their fantasies by using your loosely-coupled systems and your meta-models to build a real-time dashboard of KPIs to find, extract and display everything they want - and if you are really good, everything they actually need.
5. Going Green. I'm not talking envy, the hulk or sweetcorn here. Saving energy/water/the planet is going to continue to be a big moral plus this year. Look for green benefits in the projects you do this year - it may be server consolidation/virtualisation, reducing supply-chain miles, or just planting a tree every time you buy a PC. You can both save money AND feel smug this way.
Let us know if you have any better ideas!
John Moe
