Agile IT Architecture

Hi To share with you the ABRD v1.2 is available for download as part of the EPF practices library, instead of dowloading it from CVS http://www.eclipse.org/epf/downloads/praclib/praclib_downloads.php Please continue to contribute and help on its enhancement. I thanks all the persons who gave me good feedback and propose changes that I did incorporate in current release or will do in the future release. ABRD is becoming more and more adopted and used, it is a simple set of practices to develop business application using rule engine technology and so very relevant when we want to use BRMS platform. I'm quite busy since these last months between the acquisition of ILOG and the book I'm writing on JRules and ABRD. I could not blog as I will expect. But stay tuned, there are a lot to come in close months around BRMS ...

As Derek Miers commented on one of my old blog, some of my BPM maps were not compliant to BPMN. He was for sure right, and I bought the book ' BPMN Modeling and reference guide ' that I really encourage people to buy and read to be fluent around BPMN. I was short cutting the approach by looking at presentations you can find on the web. You can get your own interpretation of the notation and got completly wrong. So a reference is always preferable, and with this knowledge you may arrive to design good process, at least process compliant to the intent of this standard. The book is a must to be sure every one understand what a BPMN diagram is representing. Each BPMN modeler tool on the market has his own interpretation or 'add-on' so it is always interesting to get back to the intent of the notation and the reference. The book is illustrated with a lot of samples. Very useful. Thanks again Derek.

Last week I was at Dialog 09, the ILOG customer conference. It was a real success, and real pleasure to see all the BRMS customers presenting how they are able to empower the business users to maintain rules. James is blogging on Dialog , and you can see good summaries there. I was co-presenting effective rule writing, which is still a hot topic for business rule application, and there is some web seminar on this topic as soon as this week . Another important subject is about rule deployment and the different strategies for deploying rules with the IT. I will blog on that soon. The last presentation was on SMABTP , a very successful story on SOA adoption, and BRMS deployment: in 2002, Jean Michel Detavernier (CIO Deputy) has the Vision to embrace SOA at the enterprise level, deploy rules every where and put in place a real agile IT architecture. It is now possible to define new insurance product in days where it was needed months before. There are still customers, architects, and CIO