Open Technologies and Grails Speed DHS IT Application Delivery

One of our Blackstone Engineering Teams on a Homeland Security gig successfully deployed a Federal IT Investment Management application recently…from conception to production in 3 months! Lots of factors involved: great team chemistry; efficient knowledge transfer from requirements and development through testing to production; demanding excellence and faster response times from government and contractors; using the latest open technologies to speed up delivery.

According to a team member – “above all else, success was driven by a smart and patient government/contractor team that was never flustered or deterred from its delivery goal. The mix of open technologies included Grails to speed up development – which itself included Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh and of course Groovy. We deployed to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, running behind an IIS 7.5 front end (via ISAPI Redirect). Our data tier was SQL Server 2008, with SSRS (SQL’s Reporting Services) serving up reports. We actually used two databases, one that was optimized for the front end application (that ingests data), and the second optimized for reporting and business intelligence. The data structure itself is very OO (object oriented), which also necessitated having two different databases.

One of the great efficiency gains, right at the beginning, was in the requirements phase when we used Grails to rapidly prototype the application and demonstrate the required data model – in action – with a real application. That sped up the requirements and allowed us to get into development pretty much instantly”.

Find out more about great open standards-based IT application engineering results, and Federal IT career opportunities, at Blackstone Technology Consulting.

 

Have you seen? DC area IT Consulting Job Opps – TIBCO, Sharepoint, Recruiting, Architects, PMO

Just in from Blackstone Technology Group‘s Professional Consulting Services Division – loads of great DC area IT opportunities…

• Contract Recruiter – Arlington, VA
• Data Warehouse Developers (mid-senior levels) – Winchester, VA
• Information Security Specialist – DC Area
• Interwoven Teamsite Developer/Administrator – DC Area
• Java/J2EE Developers (mid-senior levels) – DC Area
• Java/J2EE Developers (Agile) – DC Area
• Microsoft Practice Lead/Solutions Architect – DC Area
• Proposal Manager – Arlington, VA
• Requirements Analysts (mid-senior levels) – DC Area
• SharePoint Architects – DC Area
• SharePoint/.NET Developers (mid-senior levels) – DC Area
• Sr.Application Developer/”Scrum Master” – DC Area
• Sr.Graphics Designer/Media Specialist – DC Area
• Sr.SharePoint Developer/Administrator – DC Area
• Sr.Systems Engineer (Rational Unified Process) – DC Area
• Sr.Websphere Application Server Engineer – DC Area
• Test Engineer (Performance and Automation) – DC Area
• TIBCO Application Engineers (mid-senior levels) – DC Area
• TIBCO iProcess Architects – DC Area
• TIBCO Software Subject Matter Expert – DC Area
  
   

Blackstone Technology DC Office – Snow Situation Update

All,

We are actively monitoring conditions and closures for tomorrow (Thursday, 2/11/2010) and will be announcing the status of the Ballston offices by 11pm EST tonight via email, Twitter and other mechanisms. Stay tuned!

**Update – today, 2/11/2010 (Thursday), the DC/Ballston office is closed. Contact us through any of our posted communications mechanisms.

 

Inclement Weather Notice – Washington DC Blackstone Technology Group

Blackstone Technology employees, friends, family, clients and partners in the Washington DC area…

Our Ballston, VA office is closed today.

Please be very careful if you must travel or commute today; it’s not recommended unless absolutely essential or urgent. Weather and road conditions continue to be poor, so please do not take unnecessary risks. Be sure to watch news reports or check with friends and family regarding their plans and status, and be prepared for contingencies including getting stuck in the snow, power outages. medical emergencies or residential structural issues.

Let us know through any of our communication channels, including this Blackstone Technology Blog, Facebook, Twitter, our Website, or internal Portal or email if you need any further information or assistance!

Stay safe.

 

Enterprise BPM 3.0 – Executing Real Time Enterprise Governance Strategies

A Blackstone Technology Group Enterprise BPM Consulting Services Point of View – by Clay Almy, Directory of Enterprise Integration, Blackstone Technology Group.

It remains true that the most valuable aspect of the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline is its ability to help an organization govern rather than just manage, but this ability requires a comprehensive view of the technologies and methods that truly make up enterprise class BPM. It also requires real time, collaborative information sharing from both the governance and participant perspectives. Executing to such a view can help deliver IT Governance Process Integration benefits, in real time.  

BPM proponents often focus on the benefits of process modeling and workflow, but in order to be truly successful, organizations must recognize that workflow and automation solutions provide only a small fraction of the benefit that can be derived from BPM. In order for an organization to reap greater benefit from BPM, it must define and automate the processes (Business Process Automation, or BPA), establish real-time monitoring using business activity monitoring (BAM) techniques, and actively push this information to real time Business Intelligence (BI) aggregation and reporting artifacts. Further, a group’s ability to streamline the activities related to improving the process through process simulation and agile methods will provide an additional layer of flexibility and value to the overall organization. In order to achieve the real time Business Intelligence driven by BPM and BAM, a commitment to both technical and organizational focus is required.

On the technical front, a healthy SOA based foundation is necessary to provide a standardized base on which to overlay the organization’s processes and service requirements, but more importantly is the understanding that the wealth of data flowing through this foundation is truly the game changer. Recognizing the importance of timing, content, and context of data flowing through and across the services layer will help a group define the most comprehensive set of requirements to support customers needs across multiple levels of the enterprise.

Once the SOA and BPM layers have been addressed, the appropriate business activity monitoring (BAM) may be overlaid for real time Business Intelligence insight and decision making at the process participant, manager, and  executive levels. The organization is now able to govern their business with accurate and timely information rather than just manage a series of workflow tasks.

On the organizational front, organizations would be wise to adopt more rapid, collaborative approaches to prototyping and more iterative approaches to technical delivery. Adopting an agile method, however, cannot be limited to just the development teams. New expectations must be set at all levels from operations up to senior management. Iterations must be expected, 70% solutions must be the new standard for iterative review, and managers and executives should require that a clearer vision be articulated from the lines of business and engineering in order to support and streamline the more fluid and flexible nature of this approach. Articulating, sharing and engaging stakeholders in the vision, from the development iterations through to post-implementation monitoring and management, is made all that much more effective utilizing “Enterprise 2.0” collaborative techniques.

Additionally, Software Development Lifecycles (SDLC) should be evaluated to ensure that the development processes have the right level of support. Operations, testing, and architectural teams should be assessed to uncover bottlenecks in information-sharing.  SDLC automation techniques like continuous integration that provide automated code management, testing, and environment setup and tear down should be the baseline – and more often than not delivered to the team via dynamic “cloud computing” mechanisms.

If organizations can get these technical and organizational approaches to BPM established, the chances of successfully transforming BPM from a management and workflow technique into a real time enterprise governance strategy are far greater. The benefits of this achievement are competitiveness, cost savings, flexibility, and insight into critical information that could be the defining factor in your organization’s success.

To learn more about Enterprise Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Automation (BPA), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions implemented using Collaborative Governance Process Integration strategies – contact us at Blackstone Technology Group.

 

Enterprise Architecture Key to Avoiding Cloud Computing CloudSprawl – AFCEA Federal Cloud Computing Environment Forum

Happy Holiday Season and New Year!

Attendance at the recent Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) Bethesda Chapter Breakfast Series entitled “Federal Cloud Computing Environments – Modernizing IT Systems” was very heavy (portended a significant growth in activity around this subject, in the new year), as viewed from the Blackstone Technology Group sponsored table. The panel discussion and DC Federal IT community networking conversation revolved around the push to promote and adopt cloud computing as part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems, and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for Federal IT in the process.

Read more here….

See more at InformationWeek…

 

#smo2009 Northern Virginia Social Media – Potomac Tech Wire Social Media 2009 Business Roundtable

At this morning’s Potomac Tech Wire “Social Media Outlook” Breakfast Round Table (follow tweets on #SMO2009), well-known presenters Rohit Bhargava, Adam Lehman, Geoff Livingston, Jake Maas, and Moderator Paul Sherman (Editor, Potomac Tech Wire gave the packed event some great insight and feedback regarding how social media’s being used in the business community (and a bit of government social media) – along with their prognostications for the future of players and contexts.

What seems like one of the big winners among comments for businesses to address, is the need to much more proactively – and with an ever-present eye towards search engine optimization (SEO) – “engage the middle” of the online press and content producers. Essentially, those blogerati and twitterati among the social media elite are most likely to consume and propagate your corporate perspectives, announcements or points-of-view if these messages are in fact conveyed as a trusted social media source. In other words, become first an engaged, trused social media community member, and this will drive your ability to convince leading social media publishers to participate in and promote your discussion. Consistent, useful tweeting and content publishing within social media protocol begets great re-tweets from those who matter in your particular online ecosystem. Your contribution of material through social media channels will also work well if it represents not only your corporate POV, but also a bit of “content curation” – i.e. hand-picked selection and enrichment of material and online sources pertaining to your topic or niche. Become a social search engine for your communities; this should not only help build your communities and community presence, but this activity across social media channels is naturally search-engine optimized in terms of time, relevance, connections.

Read more about this Information Management and Social Media topic…

 

IT Project Management and Networking

A “PM Corner” Excerpt – by Jay Demas, PMP

As an often under-appreciated or behind-the-scenes element of many Government or Commercial IT programs, “Project Management” is the discipline that provides the planning and resource scheduling necessary to turn IT budgets into clear and successful returns on investment. Blackstone Technology Group delivers program and project management consulting for IT implementation activities large and small, and we continually rely on the expertise and continuing education of our project managers to deliver success across all client engagements.

If you’re seeking training or more information about project management (whether you’re new to the project management field or already a veteran), there are many resources available to you. A great place to start is the Project Management Institute (PMI) at www.pmi.org. PMI is an international, not for profit, leading membership association for the project management profession. Your membership to PMI includes access to information on certifications, training, degrees, and jobs. In addition, you’ll have access to many PM publications, a virtual library, and a research area. As a member of PMI, you have the ability to extend to membership to local PMI Chapter, PMI Specific Interest Groups (SIGs), and PMI Colleges.

If you don’t find all the information you need from PMI, check out PMForum at http://www.pmforum.org/, the American Society for the Advancement of Project Management (asapm) at http://www.asapm.org/, or the International Project Management Association (IPMA) at http://www.ipma.ch/. Each of these organizations is looking at project management from different perspectives – be sure to evaluate multiple sites to find those that meet your needs.

Perhaps you’re looking to network with other Project Managers? Most people think you have to go to training to meet other project management enthusiasts. However, there are many project management events locally, stateside, international, and even some at sea! In the DC area, for example, you can be invited to attend breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and socials. In addition, there are symposiums, seminars, conferences, and webinars. Some of these events are free or require just a small fee.

More upcoming project management industry event information can be found here:

http://www.pmiwdc.org/events
http://www.pmi.org/pages/calendar.aspx

For more information or career opportunities regarding IT Program Management or Project Management, or to find someone with IT Project Management expertise (with either commercial or government contextual experience), contact Blackstone Technology Group.

 

Blackstone Technology Group Receives CalPERS Spring Fed Pool Refresh Award

Blackstone Expands Its Ability to Serve California State Government

SACRAMENTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–As a top provider of Technology Consulting Services to the California State Government, Blackstone Technology Group, Inc. announced today the expansion of its ability to serve the state of California through earning a CalPERS Spring Fed Pool Refresh Award. This Award will enable Blackstone to offer both expanded and enhanced IT services to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a CA state organization that provides retirement and health benefits to 1.6+ million public employees, retirees, and their families and 2,500+ employers.

As part of the Spring Fed Pool Refresh, CalPERS awarded Blackstone classifications in six new IT service verticals, namely Project Management, Architecture, Data Administration/Data Modeling, Application Development, Release Management/Quality Assurance/Configuration Management, and Management Support Services. This now expands Blackstone’s capability to service CalPERS to a total of six different verticals and thirteen related job categories.

“This is a significant step forward,” said Rick Venegas, Sr. Director of Blackstone’s CA State Government Practice. “It was an intensive effort that involved several months of Blackstone’s work combined with a deep inspection by CalPERS of Blackstone past performances to ensure we met CalPERS qualifications and standards. Based on the scope and scale of award that CalPERS delivered to us, it shows that Blackstone has met or beaten multiple bars of performance criteria for CalPERS, and that Blackstone is further deepening its credibility in the CA state government marketplace.”

Contact:
Blackstone Technology Group
Rick Venegas, Sr. Director, CA State Government Practice,
916-565-1260, ext. 327
rvenegas@bstonetech.com
www.bstonetech.com

 

A Flexible, Scalable SOA Infrastructure Testing Framework From Blackstone Technology Group

Here’s a look into Blackstone Technology Group’s SOA engineering and architecture practice, and some interesting capabilities we’re deploying right now for Federal, State and Local Government and Public Service clients. Contact us here, or provide comments via any one of our social media channels.

An SOA infrastructure environment provides the foundation and plumbing for business services within the enterprise. Business service providers and consumers rely on the SOA infrastructure to provide an expected quality of service that is often difficult to verify before providers and consumers begin to leverage the infrastructure. Once problems arise, it may be difficult to determine the root cause of an issue especially when the SOA infrastructure and business services have different owners. In order to separate issues between the infrastructure and the services and hopefully prevent the blame game, comprehensive testing of the infrastructure must be performed to validate its capabilities and performance.

Without leveraging business services, an approach to testing an SOA infrastructure is to develop mock-scenarios that simulate real world use cases. To minimize complexity, each mock-scenario will often include just a subset of components within the SOA infrastructure and may not utilize all possible transport interfaces for a particular component. To provide full coverage of the infrastructure, a series of mock-scenarios will need to be developed with each scenario testing a particular area in the infrastructure. This approach gets the job done by ensuring that every component is tested, but will quickly show its limitations when scenarios need to be altered to perform root cause analysis, understand the diagnostics of an individual component within the infrastructure, or when new components are introduced.

For a current Federal Homeland Security Information-Sharing initiative, we’ve implemented a highly-efficient and data-driven framework to test an enterprise-scale, highly available SOA infrastructure environment. In the same amount of time that it took to previously build a single test scenario, we were able to develop the initial framework implementation that can quickly support multiple scenarios that include any permutation of components and transports.

Contact Blackstone Technology Group for more information regarding implementing Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions for your business or mission needs, and to learn more about our industry-leading SOA development and testing capabilities.