KEYNOTES
The
Agile Organization
Tom DeMarco
Principal
Atlantic Systems Guild
We live in an age of acceleration. Whatever the formula was for business success a few years ago, it won't work today. Today there needs to be more and more work crammed into less and less time. There are fewer people doing more and doing it faster in less space with less support and with tighter tolerances and higher quality requirements than ever before. So we have spent the last decade becoming ever more efficient. Now enter the need for change. In the super-accelerated corporation, meaningful change of direction is almost impossible. The very improvements that the we made to go faster and cheaper have undermined our capacity to make any other kind of change. An organization that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer. In the short run it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run it's just another road wreck.
About
Tom DeMarco:
Tom DeMarco is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a New York and
London-based consulting practice. He is the author of eight books on managing
the high tech worker, including the forthcoming Random House book, SLACK AND
OTHER SECRETS OF THE AGILE ORGANIZATION. He is a past winner of the J.D Warnier
Prize for "lifetime contribution to the information sciences" and the
1999 Stevens Prize for contribution to software methods. His consulting activity
is mostly in the area of project management and litigation involving software
intensive endeavors. His mainstream novel, Dark Harbor
House, was published by
Down East Books in November, 2000.
Other
books by Tom DeMarco include:
Peopleware:
Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. (1999)
The
Deadline: A Novel about Project Management (1997)
Controlling
Software Projects: Management Measurement and Estimation (1986)
Structured
Analysis and System Specification (1985)
The ER Model, XML and the Web
Prof. Peter Chen
M. J. Foster Distinguished Chair
Professor of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
The ER Model and its variants have been used successfully
in data modeling and database design in more than twenty years.
In the past few years, the Web has become an increasingly
popular user interface to files and databases.
The XML, which is developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, is
positioned to be the mainstream markup language for the web of the future.
Recently, several XML working groups are in the process of developing
specifications related to data types, schemas, and data models.
Whether the ER model (or its variants) can serve as the
model of the web is a subject of a debate within the XML working groups. In this
talk, Peter Chen looks at some of the current modules of XML and show the
similarities and differences between the main concepts in these modules and the
main concepts in the ER model. Then, he discusses reasons why the ER model is a
good candidate for the model of the web.
About Dr. Peter P. Chen
Dr. Peter Chen holds the position of M. J. Foster Distinguished Chair, Professor
of Computer Science since 1983. Dr.
Chen is the originator of the Entity-Relationship Model (ER Model), which serves
as the foundation of many systems analysis and design methodologies,
computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and repository systems.
Dr. Peter Chen's original paper on the
Entity-Relationship model (ER model) is one of the most cited papers in the
computer software field. Recently,
that particular paper was selected as one of the 38 great papers in Computer
Science according to a survey of 1,000 computer science college professors
(Great Papers in Computer Science, edited by P. Laplante, West Publishing,
1996). The ER model was adopted as the meta model for the ANSI Standard in
Information Resource Directory System (IRDS), and the ER approach has been
ranked as the top methodology for database design by several surveys of FORTUNE
500 companies.
The Entity-Relationhsip model is described in most
textbooks on databases and information systems analysis. It is included as a
fundamental topic in the ACM/IEEE recommended curriculum on computer science and
information systems. The ER model also serves as the foundation of some of the
recent work on Object-Oriented analysis and design methodologies and Semantic
Web.
The hypertext concept, which makes the World Wide Web
extremely popular, is very similar to the main concept in the ER model.
Dr. Chen is currently investigating this linkage as a member of several
XML working groups. His work is also cited heavily in a book published in 1993
for general public called Software
Challenges published by Time-Life Books as part of the series on
"Understanding Computers".
Dr. Chen is the Editor-in-Chief of Data & Knowledge Engineering, the Associate Editor for the Journal of Intelligent Robotic Systems and other journals. In the past he was the Associate Editor for IEEE Computer, Information Sciences and other journals. He is a member of the Airlie Software Council, which consists of software visionaries/gurus and very-high-level software organization executives, organized by U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Dr. Chen is a Fellow of the IEEE, the ACM, and the AAAS. He was the recipient of Year 2000 Individual Achievement Award from DAMA International.
Conceptual Modeling: Current Issues and Future Directions (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), edited by Peter Chen, published in 1999, can be ordered through Amazon.com.