Third IEEE workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM 2008)

BDIM 2008 is on.

On April 7th at Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, co-located with NOMS 2008.

Working on the CFP now, submission deadline will most probably be in January 2008.

Back from RuleML 2007

I attended the RuleML 2007 symposium at Orlando, Florida, which was co-located with the Business Rules Forum.

My main motivation for attending was to build bridges between the BDIM community and the business rules research community, and I was quite happy with the outcome in the end. The symposium was really well organized (Adrian Paschke of Technical University Munich and Yevgen Biletskiy of the University of New Brunswick did a really good job). It definitely helped that it was co-located with the Business Rules Forum, so that they were able to put together a very strong program with four invited addresses and a very interesting panel discussion. They also ran a "challenge session" that was actually more of a demo session than something along the lines of the trading agent competition. However, it got the audience engaged and made the whole experience more interesting.

The most promising connection at this point for BDIM seems to be with the editors of the OMG's Business Motivation Model (John Hall et. al.). The business motivation model could be the basis of the framework to express business objectives and map IT metrics to them.

BDIM workshop 2.5 at HP Labs on November 1st

Taking advantage of Manweek 2007 in San Jose, CA, we are organizing a working session on business-driven IT management at HP Labs Palo Alto on November 1st, 2007. We decided to call this BDIM workshop 2.5 since it's happening between the second edition of the IEEE BDIM workshop held last year in Munich, and the next edition that we are planning to hold next April in Salvador, Brazil, co-located with NOMS 2008.

The format will be different from the usual IEEE-style workshops. We really want this to be a working session, aimed at defining a BDIM research agenda and foster the growing research community around the BDIM themes. I'll post more on BDIM 2.5 as we finalize the program.

Added my Technorati Profile.

BDIM and value-based software engineering

I hosted Vladimir Tosic from NICTA, Australia at HP labs last week. He gave a talk introducting NICTA, the Australian center of excellence for ICT and presenting his current research directions. Vladimir is a very prolific researcher. Among the various things he's looking at, his attempt to bring together BDIM and value-based software engineering got my attention. Value-based software engineering's goal, according to Stefan Biffl and his co-authors is "to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example, quality and cost or functionality and schedule – such decisions must be economically feasible and comprehensible to the stakeholders with differing value perspectives. [...] VBSE extends the merely technical ISO software engineering definition with elements not only from economics, but also from cognitive science, finance, management science, behavioural sciences, and decision sciences, giving rise to a truly multi-disciplinary framework." This link definitely deserves some investigation. On my part, I'm going to start by looking at business-driven software testing, that is driving the design of test suites not from the point of view of coverage, but from the point of view of the value to the business expressed through successive refinement of requirements.

Welcome to my blog on Business-driven IT management (BDIM)

Welcome to my blog on Business-driven IT management (BDIM).

The goal of BDIM is to to enable an enterprise to manage its IT services in accordance with its business objectives. BDIM focuses on the impact of IT on business processes and business results and vice versa; besides the conventional IT metrics such as availability and response time, it looks at key performance indicators (KPIs), that is metrics that have significance from the point of view of the business supported by the IT. The BDIM approach aims at rethinking IT management from a business perspective, whether this be in an operational, tactical or strategic context.