Rob and I will be presenting a webinar with Jason Tiret of Embarcadero Technologies on how to better collaborate with business users, developers, DBAs, and anyone else who uses your models.

When teams collaborate for a common goal and a passion for success, their projects succeed. When the opposite occurs, everyone loses, including the team, the company, and their customers.

Most IT professionals have experienced misunderstandings on at least one of their projects. A mismatch of expectations can slow down a project and lead to weak results. In some cases, organizations can get to the point where more effort is spent on resolving issues than on getting real work completed.

Join us for a live webinar with Karen Lopez and Rob Drysdale of the data management consulting firm, InfoAdvisors, as they share the knowledge gathered from their paper, The 5 Things You Need to Know about Better Collaboration with Business. They will provide tips on:

• Implementing collaborative approaches for easier projects, better products, and stronger teams
• Improving collaboration across departments with common tools
• Creating deliverables tailored to the audience
• Removing unnecessary processes standing between business users and the models
• Giving business and IT teams what they need

We'll also be demo-ing Embarcadero's new ER/Studio Enterprise Portal, showing how it supports better collaboration.

Click on the link below for more information and how to register. It's free of charge.  See all of you online on Sept 10, 2008.

Embarcadero Technologies Webinar Events

Did you ever notice that the more people that are on a meeting invitation, the more likely you are to mess up the time, date, duration, location, or conference call information for a meeting?

So if you are sending a meeting to your spouse, who loves you no matter how badly you mess up, the invite goes fine...even if it is a partially recurring, every other 3rd Wednesday of months with the letter R in their name, it's fine.

But if you have to send a meeting to a bunch of clients, their bosses, your PR guy, the CIO and some local politicians, it is guaranteed that your invitation process will look like this:

1. Draft the invite.  Proof several times.  Get a colleague to look it over.
2. Send the invite.
3. D' oh! you got the time right but for the wrong time zone.
4. Update meeting, with apologies
5. Double D' oh!  You got the time right but the date is wrong.
6. Repeat step 4
7. Breathe a sigh of relief. 
8. Receive e-mail that points out that the team in Canada will not be able to attend because it is the 2-4 holiday (What the heck is the 2-4 holiday????)
9. Pick a new date, repeat step 4, again.
10. Repeat step 7
11. Read new e-mail from the CIO that points out that while you got the date, time, time zone and topic right, you got the name of the client company wrong.
12. Repeat step 4, again....
13. Wait 30 minutes.
14. Repeat step 7.

Outlook Law #1 (OLL1): The probability of getting a meeting invitation correct on the first try is inversely proportional to the number of people on the invite list.

There's probably a corollary related to the stature of the invitees as well...

By the way, this effect really has nothing to do with Outlook as it applies to any scheduling system.  It just sounds good as OLL1.

  A reminder that Monday, 25 August is the finale date for making a proposal to speak at the 2009 DAMA Symposium Wilshire Meta Data Conference being held in Tampa, Florida in April.

Get your proposals in. 

Call for Presentations: DAMA 2009

Rob Drysdale and I have written a whitepaper for Embarcadero on how IT professionals can improve collaboration with the business side of the organization, specifically around how accessibility to meta data impacts user engagement in the IT process.

This paper introduces you to Embarcadero ER/Studio Enterprise Portal, a brand new product that is like a search engine for your data model meta data.

Rob brings his multi-decade experiences as a business user on projects to this effort, providing examples of how the Portal can encourage business use of data model information.

Go download this paper via the link below.  Rob and I would love your feedback, too.

Embarcadero Technologies // We Make Data Work

John Zachman has announced changes to his operating companies. ZIFA will be winding down and Zachman International will be the primary organization for delivering Zachman Framework related products and services.

Stan Locke will be Managing Director and President, and John's son, John P. Zachman will be VP of Marketing.  David Kingston, of Toronto, will be VP Customer Support Systems.

Sam Holcman of Pinnacle Business Group and partner in ZIFA will be moving on to his work in EACOE.

John also announced a new website, which looks great (it also uses a content management system similar to InfoAdvisors' site).

• Register

• for our iPod Touch® Give-away! (even if you are already a member).

• for the new Enterprise Standards

• to see or print the new Enterprise Framework2 graphic.

• Review

• my own 'wikipedia' concise definition of The Zachman Framework.

• the details of Zachman Certified requirements for practitioners, methodologies and tools.

• current and popular articles and reference material.

• Frequently Asked Questions that I personally have answered.

• timely announcements and press releases.

• Purchase our support products (requires registration)

• Various editions of my eBook.

• any of the new Zachman Framework2 posters.

• the new Framework2 model kits .

• An annual subscription to access the MetaFrameworks research work

• See and plan for

• Attending a scheduled conference engagement

• Attending a MasterClass course on our schedule.

• Requesting an in-house seminars or executive briefings.

If you register for the new site (and you should, even if you previously registered with ZIFA), you will be eligible to win an iPod Touch.  John is doing the right thing by not assuming that information collected as part of ZIFA should be reused without your consent for ZI.  So get over there and register.

So get on over there, register, and dip into all the great stuff available.

Zachman International

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