Notice that tree on the right with no leaves? That's right, it's winter
here, not summer; it was 33 degrees Celsius in Boston when I left on Sunday,
and 10 degrees here. Today it's cloudy and colder, but at least calm and
quiet. Flying through Santiago's Arturo Merino Benítez International
Airport (SCL) it was nice to see the repairs well underway after the horrendous
27 February 2010 earthquake, 8.9 on the Richter scale. The main terminal
is completely usable, clean and efficient, with the construction continuing
apace.
Tomorrow I'll give a keynote on software quality standardization, focusing of course on CISQ. This has been the topic of at least a third of my talks in the last few months, with quite a lot of interest being generated worldwide—not only from traditional outsourcing companies, but from other software vendors and quite a few software users and buyers. The reality is, every software development contract (whether internal or across company boundaries) has some sort of acceptance criteria, and it's absolutely high time that all the many different quality criteria come together into an agreed standard that can be used industry-wide to lower costs and increase quality. I've said quite a lot about that before so I won't belabor it.
This trip leads off a number of events over the next few months. On September 13/14, it will be back to summer for the joint OMG/CIT Workshop on Cloud Computing. CIT, the Club de Investigación Tecnológica has been a partner of OMG's in events for 15 years now, and the Club was instrumental in helping us put together and host our 20th birthday party last year.
It's always good to be back in Costa Rica, and land of contrasts: high technology and jungles, software and beaches. We were lucky and honored to have the then-President of Costa Rica (and Nobel Laureate) Dr. Óscar Arias speak at our 20th birthday party. This time we'll have the newly-elected President Laura Chinchilla open our event; she's an old friend of the OMG, having opened other events for us in Costa Rica in her previous Ministerial roles.
After that it's back to the beginning of Autumn at home, when I will be lucky
enough to enjoy an OMG
Technical Meeting week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just 10 km from my
home. Hopefully you've already registered as space is going fast and we
have several exciting co-located events in store besides the usual
standardization efforts: they include the Business
Architecture Information Day and seminars and tutorials on Modeling
and Middleware, Trusted
Software Development and Goal-Driven
Business Measurement.
No rest for the weary I'm afraid, however—I will leave midweek to participate
in an international energy forum in Monaco. Though not strictly an OMG
trip, it's an interest of mine going back many years. From there I will go
directly to the annual MDA Forum
event in Milan. This annual event always draws a remarkable speaker list (other
than yours truly of course), and I'm honored to be participating again. Last
year's event featured a side trip to a quite nice restaurant, Boccondivino my current Milanese
favorite, and I've been promised a return trip and will be holding the host to
it. Here's a picture of the cheese cart, otherwise known as the seventh
course of Boccondivino's eight-course dinner.
The Milan trip will also feature the third workshop of the Software Engineering Methodology and Tools (SEMAT)
project that I started last year with Ivar Jacobson and Bertrand Meyer.
From there it's back to Boston for HL7's 24th Annual Plenary and
Working Group Meeting, conveniently back in Cambridge, MA followed by a
quick trip to Oslo to give a dinner keynote on the first ten years of the Model
Driven Architecture. The conference is the MODELS 2010 Conference and I must say
I'm particularly excited to go back to Oslo City Hall (the Rådhus) where ten
years ago I had the honor to present awards to the creators of SIMULA67 and
arguably the object-orientation movement, Kristen Nygaard and Ole Johan
Dahl. Here's a memory jog for those that were there—Bill Hoffman and I
standing with Kristen Nygaard and the then-mayor of Oslo and host of the
reception, Per Ditlev-Simonsen.
The following week I'm off to Washington, DC—as always in Washington there will
be plenty of different meetings and activities, including a keynote on Business
Process Modeling, Business Rules and related standards at the International Business Rules Forum.
I'll be talking about Business
Ecology® of course and announcing the winner of this year's
Business Process Modeling awards from the BPM/SOA Community of Practice. I
guess that gives me an excuse to share one of my hobbies—aerial
photography. Here's an aerial shot of Washington, DC, one of my early
ones, from a Bombardier CRJ40 that had just left Washington's Ronald W. Reagan
International Airport.
From there it's off to Orlando to visit Mickey Mouse, uh, I mean, participate
in this year's Gartner
ITxpo. Our partnership with Gartner has grown substantially over the last
two years and I'm excited to participate in their mega-event again this
year. In fact, later this year I expect to be at their Application
Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, where we will present more
work from our Business Ecology Communities of Practice and OMG standardization
efforts in Cloud Computing. More later on coming trips to Brazil, Dallas,
Sydney and Bangalore. In the meantime, one of my recent aerial photos, of
the city I call home.