The SOA Consortium's 2009 Case Study Contest is over, and the winners are Cisco, BlueStar Energy Services, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and the F inancial Industry Regulatory Authority.  More details will be available very soon on the SOA Consortium site, or contact Claude for more information.

Michael Elkins: " 8 Things You Need to Know about Developing an ECM (Electronic Content Management) Information Architecture"

Claude Baudoin: " My First Hundred Days and the Birkman Method"

The CloudAve blog contains a very interesting debate about the "Enterprise 2.0" phenomenon, and the use of social tools in companies.

ACM TechNews, the tri-weekly digest of computing and technology news gathered from leading sources, is now available to non-ACM members. ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), created in 1947, is the leading professional society for computer scientists, software engineers and IT practitioners worldwide. TechNews summaries include links to the news items' original sources.

Stephen Albin's 2003 book "The Art of Software Architecture: Design Methods and Techniques" was featured in the August ACM Library newsletter. It was highly rated by Computing Reviews and on Amazon. It is available from the ACM Library, Amazon, Books 24x7, or from eBookMall.

Lengler and Eppler's Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a brilliant way to document 100 different ways to present data or information graphically. What makes it particularly handy is that when you mouse over each "element" in the table, a description and example pop up.

During the Fall 2008 Stanford EE Department's Colloquium series:

• Al Fazio of Intel discussed Future Computer Memory (skip to 0:05:30 for the real start);
• Guido van Rossum, inventor of Python, presented the Google App Engine;
• Carl Hewitt (ex-MIT prof.) talked about Scalable Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing;
• and Richard Kaufmann of HP presented Issues in Mainstream Clusters (skip to 0:03:20).

It costs $1300 to audit this Colloquium in person... but you can watch the lectures for free on YouTube less than a year later !

A: "It was interesting to see differences in IT maturity, let alone SOA, by region."
B: "Especially with respect to business participation. Immature IT is about applying technology; mature IT is about solving business problems."

"It is reported by our friends in the hype-cycle department that cloud computing is at the pinnacle of being overblown. This is characterized by vagueness in the marketplace, many different definitions of what it means, everyone and their brother jumping on the bandwagon, and of course the pathetic marketing literature with claims of being 'in the cloud, cloud friendly, cloud based' and more. Note to marketers: here's a dollar; buy yourself a clue!"