Jaywalk

Today, my company Requisite Remedy was featured in a print advertisement in Talouselämä, the leading Finnish business magazine. Here’s a PDF version of the ad (in Finnish).

I am proud to announce that my company Requisite Remedy now has a new logo and website design. Kudos to Evoke design agency for their excellent work!

I usually have my gaze firmly in the future, but on this last day of the year, I found myself gratefully reflecting on all that has happened during the last 12 months. It has been a busy year, very hectic at times, but fortunately also had some breathing room for contemplation and innovation.

This has now been my second year as an independent consultant. Whereas the first year was characterized by envisioning the future while securing the necessities of business, this year has been about starting to translate these ideas into concrete structures and features.

This year, I have also been employed as a researcher on a part-time basis, which has catalyzed my conceptual-analytical thinking to a great extent and provided a sounding board for my ideas.

At the most superficial level, my year can be summarized as follows:

January: For the whole month, I had my nose on the grindstone in a customer engagement that had begun in October. The first phase of the project ended at the end of the month.

February: I decided to extend my contract, but took the first two weeks off from the project to have a mini-holiday and to attend to some errands and appointments that had been pending. As a perfect opportunity showed itself mid month, I made a major strategic move and decided to rent an office in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My article “Agility Calls for Maturity” was published on BPTrends.

March: For the last three months, I had been quite occupied with planning and organizing SOLEA 2009 symposium. The event took place on March 19 and went really well. On the following week, I attended Holacracy training in the Netherlands. On the same trip, I also finalized the rental agreement for the new office.

April: The project was in full swing. Mid month, SOA SIG organized a seminar on Web-Oriented Architecture, and on the following week, I was speaking at IIR’s SOA seminar on SOA governance.

May: This was a hectic month with both the project work and academic work coming to a head.

June: Attended a networking event in Belgium and EAC 2009 in London. The project kept me busy until midsummer, then there was a summer break of five weeks. I was mostly chilling out, but also found time to co-author an academic paper.

July: Spent a well-deserved holiday week in French Riviera. Back to the project at the end of the month.

August: A relaxed yet productive month after the holidays.

September: Really busy in the project. There was no time for research work, but I gave a lecture on Master Data Management and Data Governance.

October: This was the last month of my contract that with several extensions had lasted for twelve months. On the first day of the month, SOA SIG co-organized a seminar on Model-Driven Architecture and Domain-Specific Modeling, featuring some renowned speakers. In October, I was also asked to start writing a new blog.

November: In early November, I was presenting an academic paper in ECMLG 2009 Conference in Athens, Greece. Also took a few days off for holiday there, before making a business trip to London.  Started to write a book.

December: On December 4, I held again my one-day training seminar on EA, BPM and SOA. After that, I have been writing the book and planning a leadership workshop.

I look forward to 2010 and hope the new year will be as productive and expansive as this one has been!

I am starting to write a new blog at ebizQ. It’s called Anatomy of Agile Enterprise and will be about strategic IT in support of organizational change and responsiveness. I aim at posting quite often, even on a weekly basis.

Consequently, this blog will likely be less about IT in the future, but I will keep summarizing interesting events and other learning experiences, refer to interesting articles and other resources, and record my thoughts here, insofar they go outside of the scope of the other blog.

I will generally not cross-post to both blogs, so if you are a subscriber to this feed, you may want to follow the other one as well.

Apologies for the recent disruptions and downtimes pertaining to my blog, email and web site. I am in the process of moving my virtual home to a new webhotel, which I believe will provide a more reliable environment in the future. The worst problems should be over now.

Today, at last, I obtained a virtual home, my own personal web page.

I started furnishing it by installing this weblog, or blog. Why? I have never felt compelled to publish a static home page, but plugging into the rapidly growing Blogosphere of 30.2 million blogs — it is essentially different.

A blog, it seems to me, instigates dialogue, both with others and within oneself. It disciplines thinking and self-directed learning. It allows me to express trains of thought that would otherwise fade away, give them an organized, rhethorical form. It makes me think. It makes me communicate.

It makes me a cog in the machine, yet another synapse in the massive computation of this glass bead game.