Murray Cantor on IT Governance

Network Computing India ran a two-page interview with Rational's Dr. Murray Cantor on the subject of IT governance. The Q&A captures Murray's opinions about the need for governance in the industry.

We've been focusing on governance a lot here on the Architecture Management team, but there's still lots of uncertainty about what is meant by IT Governance. Murray clears it up in the Q&A:

The first part is about looking at your IT organization and reasoning about the decision rights, authority so that you know that right people are making right decisions. Policies are a way of informing and constraining those decisions. They provide guidance around the decision process. The second part is about putting in place measurements and controls so that you know that the IT organization is delivering what it needs to deliver to be effective.

We're working on projects like Asset Manager to help with governance of IT assets, and you'll be seeing us add to the collaborative, analysis and accessibility aspects of the solutions over time. Right now, in fact, we're offering a rebate on Asset Manager and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) if you buy them together to help governance of your SOA assets.

Telelogic Acquisition gains EU approval

After many months of deliberations, IBM's acquisition of Telelogic was given the green light by the European Union yesterday. The news was widely reported across the globe. Some reports are linked here:

Infoworld: With the acquisition of Telelogic, IBM will become by far the largest vendor of two types of software development tools: software modelling and requirements management tools. Initially the Commission suspected that the combined strength of the two companies would skew competition in these market sectors, pushing up prices and shutting out competitors....
"The deal will not harm competition in Europe or in any part of Europe," the Commission said.

InformationWeek and, amazingly enough, PhysOrg.com also commented.

Welcome to the team, Telelogic!

Super Bowl XLII and IBM Rational!

This week, IBM will demonstrate current and future portal technologies at the Media Center during Super Bowl Week. IBM has collaborated with the NFL and other partners to build the NFL's new media portal, NFLMedia.com.

According to the press release, amongst other technologies:

IBM Rational software development and testing tools were used throughout the software development lifecycle. The league builds custom portlets with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, which pull information from a variety of internal sources to provide fresh content as it becomes available.

How cool is that! Not only can you watch the Super Bowl, you can also check out all kinds of stats and stories through the portal, safe in the knowledge that Rational technology was used to make sure it doesn't go down at the wrong moment (hopefully).

Go Giants!

Grady will answer you rquestions...

Following up from an earlier post, there's now a page up that you can go to where you'll be able to sign up for Grady's Q&A session. Details are below:

Nov 29 at 1:00pm eastern
Grady Booch on Architecture: Join Grady in an interactive discussion around architecture and reuse. Get your questions answered.
Registration opening soon!

Here's the link: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/talks/

Computerworld Booch article.

Wow, this blog seems to have turned into all Grady, all the time.

Just wanted to point everyone to a new article in Computerworld magazine this week. It's a Q&A session with Grady, going into details about the difficulties of software development, open source and Second Life. You can check it out here.

By the way, just like me, he's also a big Mac fan (just got my copy of Leopard yesterday, and the install on my wife's ibook went flawlessly. I'm now enjoying all the shiny Leopardy goodness).