Spaceships, Aliens, And Androids: The Scott & Todd SXSW 2013 Podcast Debrief

Scott Laningham and I first met around six years ago at SXSW Interactive.  Scott was already well known for his developerWorks podcast series and blog, and he was walking around the conference talking to people, so we decided to sit down and do a podcast discussing all the cool things we’d seen and learned about during the conference.

It was the beginning of a wonderful and still ongoing collaboration, and since that time, Scott and I have shared the stage at numerous IBM conferences, interviewing industry luminaries, IBM executives and business partners, and other thought leaders.

But we always come back to SXSW Interactive. And so it was with 2013.

Scott and I sat down on Friday via Skype and chatted for nearly 30 minutes about all the interesting things we heard and learned about at this year’s event, the first time it reached over 30,000 attendees.

Some would say SouthBy has jumped the shark. I’m not so sure. I joked early on in the event last week that perhaps it had jumped a few dolphins.

Has it gotten a lot more crowded?  Absolutely.

Has it stretched the outer limits of Austin’s hotel and transportation capacity?  Without question.

Do you have to wait in long lines stretching halfway around the Austin Convention Center just to see a keynote?  Yes yes yes.

And to my mind, it’s still worth every minute.

P.S. Scott has also established a new blog, which you can find right here on WordPress.

IBM Promotes Collaboration, Reduces Complexity Using Jazz

The IBM Innovate 2011 event kicks into its third day down in Orlando, and the announcements have already started streaming out of the event, as has the Livestream coverage for those of you who couldn’t make it to Orlando.

Today, IBM announced new software that helps organizations collaborate more efficiently throughout the entire software and systems development process.  It allows developer teams to quickly access resources and work across global boundaries through an open, collaborative development environment.

This was a theme we heard consistently in yesterday’s keynote session, the need to be more agile, more collaborative, and increasingly across spatial and temporal boundaries.

Improving the Economics of Software Development

To reiterate the point, just glance through the topline of the latest IBM CEO Study which covered 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide.  Two-thirds of global organizations manage software development teams working in multiple locations.

The study also found there is a growing unpredictability in getting software through development and into is full application within an organization.  More than 62% of development projects fail to meet the intended schedule and 30% of project costs are due to rework and poor execution of requirements.

The new software helps organizations align their software investments with business process and operations across an entire organization, creating stronger linkages between planning and execution.  It’s now possible to tap into talent wherever it is located, quickly accessing resources and include appropriate decision makers throughout the entire business cycles.

Built on Jazz

The new software offerings are built on Jazz, IBM’s open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among software and systems design and development teams.

New features allow developers to interact quickly; share data instantaneously from any source in the development process and connect teams and development communities in new ways.

• Collaborative Design Management: Enables teams to integrate designs seamlessly with other development tasks and information, such as requirements, code, and quality management assets. The benefits of this approach enhance the traceability of all actions, allowing their impact on the process to be analyzed.  Team members and other stakeholders can review, contribute and change solution designs with complete transparency to every participant in the project.
• Collaborative Lifecycle Management: The IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management helps software development teams improve their productivity by offering an integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) solution to avoid the pitfalls of working in silos with broken communication, which results in project delays, low quality or budget overruns.
• Collaborative Development and Operations:  New technologies, such as cloud computing, workload optimization and Agile development are driving the need for development and operations to work more closely than ever before. IBM has created new integrations between many of its leading software offerings that can significantly assist in bridging the cultural divide between development and operation teams.

Visit IBM Rational to learn more about these new offerings.

And don’t forget to tune in for tomorrow’s (Wednesday, June 8th) opening session at Innovate 2011 at 8 AM EST, whereupon Grady Booch will discuss the IBM Watson technology.

UPDATE: developerWorks’ guru (and my good buddy) Scott Laningham has been very busy talking to folks on the show floor at Innovate.  You can check out his excellent interviews here.