On Monday I saw an entertaining and thought-provoking talk in Sydney by Ivar Jacobson, one of the inventors of UML. The talk was about agile development – what they don’t teach you in school. Ivar discussed the eternal problem of developing good software, quickly, at low cost. There’s a convergence happening between software engineering and enterprise technology, and so the talk was a good way to gather a crowd as part of a soft launch of the Alinement Network – a new online community for enterprise management technology practitioners.
Enterprise management is key for most complex businesses. The technology powering the operations and management of the enterprise is a big market, and the vendors are good at building communities to support their users. But surprisingly there aren’t many places on the net where people can discuss the discipline, theories, and technologies in a vendor-neutral space.
So, the Alinement Network could be an interesting space. The guy behind it is Louis Taborda, a Sydney-based practitioner with a long history working in the enterprise architecture and application lifecycle management tools market. I first met Louis when he was finishing his PhD at MGSM – on configuration management and change management for enterprise systems. Change (enabled by what Ivar called software “extensibility”) is at the heart of most of the hard problems in enterprise management technology.