Agile IT Architecture

Our team just publicly published a white paper on how to use Watson Discovery on the IBM Cloud platform to create content collections and custom cognitive applications. It is related to the training tutorial I co-developed with colleagues at IBM but adds other best practices and business use cases. You can read this pdf here:  IBM-Advantage-Paper-for-Cognitive-Discovery.pdf Please give us feedback.

Today I presented to IBM Reference Architecture team, with Guilhem Molines, IBM Operational Decision Management product architect, a new solution we are using during our consulting engagements that leverages the Watson conversation to gather customer's input and send to a decision service running in ODM. The solution is implemented as part of github.com ( https://github.com/ibm-cloud-architecture/refarch-cognitive-prod-recommendations ) so every IBM customers or consultants can study it. Integrating chatbot in business applications, is definitively a trend started two years ago, and a lot of companies are still implementing solutions today. As part of the continuous improvement and optimization of the business operations, the next step is to use the data gathered during the conversation and apply business rules on top of it to deliver next best action or best recommendations. This will limit the human intervention to complex cases only, offloading the workload to rule engine...

I am part of a group developing reference architecture and assets for IBM Cloud division. One of the major and most visited content is the Cognitive Reference Architecture  https://www.ibm.com/cloud/garage/content/architecture/cognitiveArchitecture/ We are starting a set of Video on Cognitive Reference Architecture  https://www.ibm.com/w3-techblog/solutions/2017/11/cognitive-ai-solutions/ And the implementation is progressing at  https://github.com/ibm-cloud-architecture/refarch-cognitive Feel free to contact me for enhancements and feedback.

Hello,  Do you want to get explanations on how to do hybrid integration with IBM Middleware products, cloud native app  running on public or private cloud? The first hybrid integration configuration with cloud-native application (angular 4, nodejs/expressjs) is deployed on IBM Cloud Private, connect to API Connect running on premise, connected to IBM Integration bus to process an interface mapping flow, connected to a SOAP service to expose CRUD operations for inventory data source which runs on Liberty, and the data are persisted in DB2.  You can see the light tutorial at this address:  https://github.com/ibm-cloud-architecture/refarch-integration/blob/master/docs/icp/README.md   Let me know your thoughts, and ideas

Next week the 10/10 is the IBM Cloud University in Berlin, a lot of good sessions will be presented on public and private cloud. I will deliver one presentation and two deep dive labs: Watson Discovery with weather collection:  Reference . This lab was already presented internally to our technical staff in Dallas, London, Melbourne and Tokyo. The public web page tutorial can be accessed in the IBM Cloud Garage Method tutorial web site :  Watson Conversation to implement an IT Support chat bot ( Reference ): This is also a lab presented multiple times to our internal technical staff. The public web page tutorial can be accessed in the IBM  Garage Method Tutorial If you want to go over the hello world and access to some best practices to implement those solution, please come or visit those tutorials.

Hybrid integration with cloud native application With the importance of cloud development, one major subject is to address how to integrate with existing assets running behind the firewalls. I am leading a new effort at IBM to deliver implementation validation covering integration between a angular 4 nodejs/expressjs app deployed as cloud foundry app or within docker container and integrating existing SOA service and on-premise database. The solution is open-source and can be downloaded from https://github.com/ibm-cloud-architecture/refarch-integration .

A friend and colleague today asked me a very good question so as I spent one hour on it, I think it makes sense to share the information with IBM ODM 8.0.x users. The request is what are the best practices and governance approach to follow for supporting multiple 'tenants' in IBM ODM Decision Server? In Decision Server there are different user groups, each group may be responsible of multiple projects, but users in the group could not see projects of other groups. Obviously this is supported by the product out of the box, but it is important to follow some practices. First it is important to understand the synchronization architecture as describe in Synchronization architecture . As a long time best practice it is important to synchronize a rule project from Design to Decision Center (DC) when the BOM is stable, but in fact there is an alternate approach is to define empty project in Decision Center as soon as your development effort starts. The rule project name has to...