David Sprott

I am sitting in the african sunshine supposedly having a month off work. However I suppose looking after grandchildren was never going to be a cakewalk! But one of the real benefits of taking time away, even if it's not a vacation as such, is that one gets time to sort out issues... (more)

My old friend Dan French penned an interesting blog last month. He was thinking about how the common answer today to the question of how to drive efficiency (and thus profit) in big companies is around transformation and standardisation in common processes, a shift to shared serv... (more)

Last week Facebook announced its plans for IPO and it certainly made me stop and think, would I invest my money in a company that has a socialist manifesto epitomized by “the Hacker Way”. Sure lots of people will make a lot of money, particularly Mr Sugar Mountain, but is a compa... (more)

Agility is one of those words beloved by software industry marketing people. Over time it has become almost embarrassing and meaningless. Yet if you are in doubt I suggest asking Eastman Kodak, RIM, Palm, Yahoo or Nortel what they think the term means. When you don't have agility... (more)

I note in the Business Process Trends Advisor Paul Harmon is confused about what is a capability. What Harmon is missing is that capabilities are not just another modelling device that further helps to understand the business. Rather they are core structural concepts that allow ... (more)

The way we design business is undergoing profound transformation. For the past 100 years business design has been directly influenced by Frederick Taylor, focused on how we do work and how we can make it more efficient. The LEAN and Six Sigma movements are the visible manifestati... (more)

It’s now fourteen years since CBDI was formed. In the early days our mission was, as a think tank, to evangelize new ideas of modularity, separation, contract based and service orientation. We had a vision then; it was the enterprise, every enterprise, as a set of services deplo... (more)

When I am asked about the state of SOA, I sometimes comment that anything involving architectural change is bound to take a little time. But my more considered response would be that whilst the impression of SOA is now widespread, true implementation of the SOA vision, for most e... (more)

After a near death experience SOA is alive and well. After mixed early learning experiences, most enterprises are seeing SOA in a fresh light. Just the other day one company was discussing with me their "SOA Reboot" project! They are in good company. I observe widespread activity... (more)

I note Tom Graves, Robert Phipps and Richard Veryard discussing vectors as a metaphor for enterprise change. They argue As-Is and To-Be models are way too static. The organization is not a series of snapshots, rather it is a complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected series of co... (more)

In October 2010 Gartner Group assessed that Cloud Computing is at the top of the Hype Curve, the peak point of inflated expectations. But no one really needs this authoritative assessment to confirm an opinion that the industry in general is still in the early stages of Cloud Com... (more)

I am almost shocked by the vast volume of tweets hitting #Cloud. Of course it’s a reflection of the frenetic level of interest in the subject. But it’s also because Cloud Computing is such a huge, complex domain. Following in the well-trodden path of many new information technolog... (more)

In October 2010 Gartner Group assessed that Cloud is at the top of the Hype Curve, the peak point of inflated expectations. But no one really needs this authoritative assessment to confirm an opinion that the industry in general is still in the early stages of Cloud Computing. An... (more)

There's a lot of loose talk about Cloud and SOA. From what I see most SaaS today is not SOA. In fact it's mostly multi-tenanted Web applications with a browser interface. This "may" be satisfactory for SMEs but for larger enterprises this likely to be unacceptable. The primary in... (more)

I am currently working on extending the CBDI-SAE meta model for Cloud. I started this exercise by making some specific assumptions:1. I am interested in the larger enterprise perspective; enterprises probably need more knowledge of the underlying capabilities than SMEs if for no ... (more)

Don’t you believe it! For many larger organizations SOA is only now becoming central to key business strategies. Whilst SOA has been around for almost a decade, few companies have achieved real maturity. Governance issues in particular have allowed fragmented service oriented sol... (more)

SearchSOA.com interviewed co-authors Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes to discuss their recently published book, SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud (Prentice Hall, April 2011). The Q&A didn’t encourage me to buy their book. Question: How you def... (more)

Everware-CBDI has announced the immediate availability of the CBDI-SAE UML Profile for SOA V3 (SAE Profile). The SAE Profile makes Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for SOA practical for everyone. Whilst introducing a sensible level of compliance with industry standards such as Soa... (more)

So Microsoft is to become the new owner of Skype! This is big news for us that run our business and personal communications on the platform. I suspect we were all relieved when eBay finally recognized the inevitable and sold a majority stake to investors who have largely trodden ... (more)

I have become increasingly concerned that in the typical enterprise the major business improvement disciplines operate to some extent as silos. EA is often disconnected from Business Architecture. BPM is frequently not well connected with EA and Application Modernization. Governa... (more)