What's New at I.T. Works ?

We repeat our highly successful seminar with Jos van Dongen on the 11th of March. Jos is one of Europe's leading analysts, authors and speakers on Open Source Business Intelligence. He presents the open source alternatives for your BI stack, with an overview of the market, cost/benefits and pitfalls. He will also show how the leading Open Source BI suites compare to the leading closed source alternatives like Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft and Oracle; and advise you where and how to start implementing OS BI solutions. More information at our Web site.

Anyone can become an innovator. You just have to open your mind, ears and eyes for solving user problems, business constraints, excess complexity and inadequate business processes. This workshop teaches you the basic techniques of innovation and how to look for constraints and triggers that will either obstruct or facilitate innovation. Most of all, we explain you how to become an Ideas Broker with a constant "eye for innovation", how to apply these techniques in your work environment, and how to embed innovation in your organization. Full details about this workshop on 7 and 8 September 2009 can be found on our Web site, and it is still possible to take advantage of the early registration until July 31, 2009.

We repeat our highly successful seminar with Peter Hinssen on the 23rd of September. With business pressure on IT increasing, and the trust of business in IT decreasing, we need to blend IT into the business, which Peter calls "Business/IT Fusion". He just wrote a book about this, and presents a seminar on this fascinating concept. Learn how to regain trust, and how to develop a new, pro-active and innovative IT department, with new skills and competencies, and probably a new type of CIO. Discover the power of Enterprise Architecture for Fusion, how to implement Intelligent Governance, and how to use a marketing and communication plan for IT.

Chris Potts explains how to rapidly and clearly formulate a corporate strategy for IT that your board will understand, that clearly shows the links between business value creation and IT costs, and that deeply integrates IT with corporate and business strategies. Don't miss the two-day seminar "The Corporate Strategy for IT" on 28-29 April 2009 in Antwerp (Belgium) and receive a free, autographed copy of Chris' book "FruITion".

Enterprise architecture is your key to long-term IT decisions and your catalyst for aligning business and IT. The next series of our very successful "Certified Enterprise Architect" Series of workshops is repeated in December 2008 (Fundamentals), March 2009 (Applied) and April 2009 (Advanced). They are presented by John Gøtze, President of the Association of Enterprise Architects (the a|EA) and co-author of the upcoming "Coherency Management" book.

The next session of our very successful "Mastering the Requirements Process" workshop is planned on 2-4 March, 2009 in Brussels, and presented by James Robertson. James is one of the authors of the Volere Requirements Specification Template, available in many languages, and recently translated in Dutch.

De vernieuwde RTBF-site was drie weken een van de cases op ons seminarie "Ervaringen met Open Source Content Management".  Nu de site gelanceerd is, kan we de presentaties downloaden als pdf:

• Introductie door Erik Hartman, Hartman Communicatie
• Website project als verandertraject: de rol van een Open Source CMS door Hilde Van Lysebeth, Vlerick
• "Aan de Slag" (overheidssite) met Hippo door Bob Lannoy, Smals
• RTBF site netwerk met Drupal door Wim Janin, One Agency
  (zie ook de video opname door Luc Van Braekel)
• Dossierafhandeling bij de gemeente Maastricht met Alfresco door Geert Mortier, Amplexor

De presentaties van het het seminarie van 17 april zijn te downloaden als pdf:

• Elektronische facturatie: een overzicht (Anthony Belpaire)
• Elektronische facturatie juridisch bekeken (Olivier Verhaeghe en Pieter Breyne, PricewaterhouseCoopers)
• Invoice management en Purchase-to-Pay (Anthony Belpaire)
• Case study: Carrefour (Pieter Vanhoutte, verantwoordelijke EDI)
• Case study: DHL (Gabrielle Philippens, Senior Process Consultant)
• Case study: Telenet (Geert De Pooter, Billing & Collections Director)
• Case study: Q8 Benelux (Geert Haecx, Card Systems Coordinator, en Serge Goubert, Sales Manager Liberty Card)
• Elektronische facturatie: toekomstperspectieven (Anthony Belpaire)

Our courses "Mastering the Requirements Process" and "Mastering the Requirements Process (Advanced Workshop)" have been endorsed by the IIBA (the International Institute of Business Analysis) as
being aligned to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK) and are
recommended for people who wish to sit the Certified Business Analysis
Professional (CBAP) exam.

By the way, if you are interested in business analysis, you should take a look at their 329-page freely downloadable BABoK document (7.5 MB PDF). It is to business analysis what the PMBoK is to project management: a reference with the most important best practices.

De presentaties van het het Virtualisatie seminarie op 20 juni zijn te downloaden als pdf:

• Virtualisatie introductie door Bart Scheenaerts
• Virtualisatie: overzicht door Wim Van Balen en Toni Verbeiren
• Hardware virtualisatie door Toni Verbeiren
• Case Study De Lijn door Bert Van Hemelen
• Applicatie Virtualisatie door Wim Van Balen
• Case Study Newtec door Koen Vereeken en Kris Buytaert

De presentaties van het het seminarie "Enterprise Search Oplossingen" zijn te downloaden als pdf:

• Business case, concepten, technologie- en marktoverzicht door Paul Hermans (Amplexor)
• Search en Usability door David De Block,  Internet Architects
• Case Study: Digipolis Gent door Luc Peeters

U kan de presentaties van het seminarie van dinsdag 12 december als pdf downloaden:

• Intro en Wrap-up door Francis Devolder 
• Xforms door Klaas Bals 
• Xforms toepassing: Scriptura door Klaas Bals 
• InfoPath door Yves Kerwyn
• FEDICT-Shared Services case study door Leslie Goossens
• Adobe Intelligent Document Platform door Ronny Van De Maele
• Kind & Gezin case study  door Danny De Craemer en Gunther Verheuen

Het programma voor het jaarlijks overzicht van de belangrijkste ICT thema's ligt vast. Peter Hinssen, Rick van der Lans, Hendrik Vanmaele, Jan Henderyckx en Patrick Reyniers geven u de nieuwste trends in application delivery, SOA, BPM, informatie-architectuur en business/IT alignment. Komt IT binnenkort on-demand uit de kraan ? Is SOA leuk speelgoed of bittere noodzaak ? Hoe meet je de performantie van een IT afdeling ? Lost master data management (MDM) het metadata probleem voorgoed op ? Hoe verkoop je IT aan de business ? Zorgen SOA en BPM ervoor dat IT nog een strategische rol kan spelen in uw bedrijf ? Kom het ontdekken op het I.T. Works seminar "De Toekomst van ICT" op 23 november (14-21u) in Diegem nabij Brussel.

• Firebug en Venkman: Firefox extensies voor het debuggen van javascript
•  Besproken frameworks en toolkits: dojo, DWR, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Backbase, ZK, Atlas, Adobe Flex
• Code samples : Ajax.zip

In the Requirements Management seminar, Suzanne Robertson mentioned some interesting online resources:

• the templates for Stakeholder Analysis, by Scenario Plus.  You can download them here.
• on Mind Mapping: see the Wikipedia definition and tools list

Do not forget to have a look at the resources at Suzanne and James Robertson's website as well.