Keynotes

Tuesday, April 30, 2002 8:45 AM to 9:45 AM

IT/Business Megatrends in the Coming Years

Ed Yourdon
CEO
Nodruoy Inc.

As we move into an increasingly uncertain and chaotic new millennium, business executives, strategic planners, industry pundits, and technology forecasters are asking themselves "What will be the key issues, problems, and opportunities facing us in the coming years?" Along with everyone else, the IT industry will surely be caught up in this process of re-examining paradigms that may no longer be valid in the post-September-11 period, as well as more traditional activities of strategic planning, re-prioritizing of current activities, and forecasting of what's likely to be important over the next decade.

In some cases, IT managers will be looking for incremental improvements in familiar areas such as software quality and programming productivity. In other cases, they'll be looking for "quantum leap" improvements, or they'll be looking for ways to implement concepts like e-business to make their business substantially more competitive. But perhaps the most exciting possibility of this kind of strategic planning is looking for "new dimensions" -- new opportunities that simply didn't exist before various "enabling" technologies became cheap enough, robust enough, and pervasive enough that we could take advantage of them.

This kind of strategic planning is a critical activity in any organization, but there are a number of familiar obstacles that often prevent it from being as effective as it could be — obstacles such as the distraction of current crises and fire-fighting activities, the "not-invented-here" syndrome, bureaucratic inertia, etc. Thus, it's useful to have the outside perspective of an unbiased IT veteran like Ed Yourdon, who has the opportunity to inject fresh and creative ideas into the planning process.

Edward Yourdon is one of the ten most influential men and women in the software field, according to Crosstalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering. In June 1997, he was inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame, along with such notables as Charles Babbage, Seymour Cray, James Martin, Grace Hopper, Gerald Weinberg, and Bill Gates. An internationally recognized consultant and lecturer, he is the author/coauthor of more than two dozen books, including Managing High-Intensity Internet Projects, Death March, The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, and Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.

Ed is widely known as the lead developer of the structured analysis/design methods of the 1970s, and was a co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented analysis/design and the popular Coad/Yourdon OO methodology in the early 1990s.

Ed is the author of over 525 technical articles and has also authored or coauthored 26 computer books since 1967, including a mediocre novel on computer crime and a damn good book for the general public entitled Nations At Risk (which garnered favorable reviews, but not much more than a few loud yawns from the aforementioned public). His latest book is Managing High-Intensity Internet Projects, published by Prentice Hall in October 2001. Among his recent books are Death March (1997), Case Studies in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (1996), Mainstream Objects (1995), and Object-Oriented Systems Development: An Integrated Approach (1994), as well as two earlier OO books co-authored with Peter Coad. Several of his books have been translated into Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Polish, and other languages; and his articles have appeared in virtually all of the major computer journals.

Wednesday, May 1, 2002 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM

Trends in Metadata/Data Management

Peter Aiken
Founding Director, Institute for Data Research
Virginia Commonwealth University

Peter Aiken is Founding Director of the Institute for Data Research and an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research has widely explored the area of data engineering and its relationship to systems and business reengineering. He is the author of Data Reverse Engineering and Clive Finkelstein's co-author of Corporate Information Portals (McGrawHill 1996/99). A new collaboration titled Achieving EAI with Service-Based Architectures (ISBN:0471415154 Wiley) is due out in 2002. Related research publications have appeared in the IBM Systems Journal, IEEE Software and many others. He is a member of ACM, and the IEEE (Senior Member), has been a DAMA International Advisor since 1999 and received their 2001 International Achievement Award. He has lectured internationally on these and related topics.

Thursday, May 2, 2002 11:10 AM to 12:10 PM

The Future of Data Management

Bill Inmon
Partner
billinmon.com

In a relatively short amount of time, the IT profession has come from punched cards and paper tape to petabyte data warehouses. And as technology has progressed, so has the stewardship and management of the technological environment. This presentation outlines how data management has evolved through the many different advances in technology over the years.

Bill Inmon, father of data warehousing, has 43 books in print in 9 languages. Bill has published approximately 750 articles and 100 white papers. Bill founded and took public the worlds first ETL company. In addition Bill has a web site - www.billinmon.com - that attracts more than a million people a month. Bill speaks at conferences and seminars around the world. Bill has two software patents. Bill is a columnist for Data Management Review magazine and BMC’s DBAzine.

In addition to developing the concept of the data warehouse, Bill and Claudia Imhoff developed the corporate information factory and both write about and speak about the corporate information factory regularly.