Vote for a cause on Tripadvisor.com

Vote for a cause on tripadvisor.com and help them donate one million dollar to a world cause!
I have just fulfilled my duty as a human being and cituzen of the world and voted for my preferate NGO, so do the same. You even get a small 9 pages long green holiday trip booklet by email.

Link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Causes.

Marwane El Kharbili

L'amour a la marocaine...

J'ai toujours ete un facon de l'humour noir bien sombre et mechant, a la sauce ironie acide... Bon, c'est peut-etre une facon un peu extreme de voir les choses :D Mais pour en venir au sujet, il s'agit de l'amour au maroc. Vous me direz, mais l'amour...c'est une chose universelle, tout le monde doit connaitre, tout le monde doit avoir des idees similaires sur le sujet...Non, les marocains, pour ceux qui ne les connaissent pas, sont une sous-espece du genre humain qu'aucune science connue ne pourrait ni comprendre ni expliquer. Les journalistes de TelQuel, periodique que j'adore tout simplement, avec lesquels je ne suis pas d'accord sur un nombre de choses, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit de religion, avaient ecrit une chronique il y a 3 ans sur l'amour au maroc. ceux qui connaissent le style des petits gars de TelQuel ne seront pas surpris par le melange d'ironie et de serieux avec lequel ils parlent de la chose. cette ironie qui nous est bien propre nouspermet de rire de nos problemes, de nos defauts et de nos peurs sans pour autant deprimer ou penser au suicide, c'est la solution miracle qui a permis au marocains de survivre a des siecles d'histoire mouvante. Done tout cela, c'est pour vous motiver a jeter un coup d'oeil a l'article en ligne de TelQuel: Les marocains et l'amour. Bonne lecture!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Control SOX ROI Calculator

Doing it once not being a rule, this time I got something useful to say actually :D

I found this Internal Controls ROI calculator through the Inside Sarbanes-Oxley Blog. This calculator by Aline should help you explain your management that every penny spent of creating and managing internal controls actually get back in your pocket in ways that are not directly to see.

Marwane El Kharbili

Check your nerdiness!

On Dr. gernot Starke's blog (IT & more), I discovered a link to a page evaluating one's own nerdiness score. I decided I had no problem with that and that I would be very curious to know what my score would be. I do not think being nerdy is a bad thing, I even appreciate working with nerds. I have to say because of my background I have been in contact with many of them, but a lot less now that I have started my professional career. Nerds are actually very funny people, and most of them have very specific views on the world and on people. It is always very interesting to talk to nerds, but you certainly have got to come from the same background as them, at least to understand what they are saying and be able to discuss with them.

I will say nothing about the questions you'll get, so you'll be able to be surprised. But the questions are really asked by a nerd, although these questions are really primary class level for a real nerd, i.e. they are extremely easy and quick to answer if you have at least been a nerd or lived and spent much time around nerds :D

One thing before I tell the results, I have been trying for years to quit my short but intensive nerdy times and I really answered intuitively, as quick as possibel and most of all, honestly (means that I answered what I think and not what I know a nerd would answer). So I took the test and....my score is...:
______________________________________________

Overall, you scored as follows:

16% scored higher (more nerdy),
1% scored the same, and
83% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.
______________________________________________

Lol, isn't that funny....euuh...I guess only a nerd would find this funny...ok, ok, it's not funny :D

Oh and now my score is from now on to be seen for ever on my blog, look for it!

Marwane El Kharbili.

PS: If you are really a nerd, then this website is for you: plenty of nerd tests.

Google's protocol buffers

Google made its protocol buffers language publicly available. Our american pals have been using this data description language internally for a long time and because of its simplicity and thus ease (and speed) of processing has quite some advantages when compared to XML. If you only need a simple serialization data format to convey information and do not need complex processing techniques, then you might wanna have a look at protocol buffers. Protocol buffers provides simple models: lists and records while making the size of data necessary to encode information 3 to 10 times smaller than XML-based formats (dialects). Parsing is said to be 20 to 100 times quicker. Using the simple list and record structures, it is possible to generate classes in a target language such as python or java or any language of choice in order to write logic for those structures.

The language has now gone open source. So something similar to IDL but google guys say it is not as complicated. See google's announcement here and the page of the project on google code here, where you can among other things download the project.

Marwane El Kharbili

Source: JournalDuNet: http://www.journaldunet.com/developpeur/breve/international/29225/google-propose-une-alternative-a-xml.shtml

BPM Standards Presentation by Prof. zur Muehlen

I think you really have to see this presentation by Prof. zur Muehlen on BPM standards, Origins, Overview, and Directions. Very thourough work by somebody with years of experience in research on BPM. You may be surprise by the insights and the novel perspectives under which the fuzzy concept of BPM, which is more than ever on the verge of becoming yet another inflated buzz word can bring you. I am very glad Pro. zur Muehlen wrote this 80 slides long presentation. I think it is useful to both business people and researchers. Enjoy!

Business Process Management Standards Tutorial

view presentation (tags: bpm bpmn bpel xpdl)

Marwane El Kharbili

Gratis Seminare in Karlsruhe

A friend of mine let me know about this company inKkarlsruhe which offers free seminars to students and freshly graduated individuals. The seminars are very relevant to ypoung people that are abou to or have just recently entered the job market. Seminar topics are among others:

Berufsstarter-Seminar,Karriere-Tag: Bewerbung und Assessment-Center-Training, Assessment-Center Trainings, Rhetorik- & Kommunikationsseminar.

Check out the link here: http://www.karrierecoaching-karlsruhe.de/seminare.asp

Marwane El Kharbili

Business rules and decision tables workshop

This event took place in Dortmund, at the university of applied sciences. I had an invited talk there with my IDS Scheer colleague Dr. Markus Fischer. We basically explained the ARIS approach in building business rule-enhanced applications by integrating business process management with business rule management. we motivated the use of business rules in BPM and showed conceptually how they allow increasing business flexibility and business agility. Another aspect is business control, by outsourcing decisions from business processes and modeling these in deicated ARIS business rule models. We also further explained how the ARIS Business Rules Designer (ABRD) tool shall fit into the ARIS BPM lifecycle and introduced in our talk how process monitoring techniques can be used to monitor business rule execution as a mean of controlling business and making it better.

we got a quite a few questions from the professionals in the attendency about how the alogorithms work underneath the GUI and how the engine optimizes and discovers inconsistencies in the decision tables. This is normal becaus ethe attendency were actually business rules and decision table specialists such as Prof. Horst Strunz. Prof. Strunz gave an enlightning talk about the beginnings of business rules and thnaks to this pioneer, I now understand a lot more about the histrory of a techniques for which international standards have been written already in the seventies.

the other interesting talks were among others, some application cases by students of the european master in project management directed by Pro. Reusch who has also more than ten years experience in the decision tables domain. Then came the talk by a colleague from LF-ET, a partner of Software AG, who presented their approach for decision tables and has shown what functionalities were integrated in theor tooling. He also talked about new directions of work by opening the use of LF-ET to other application systems than Software AG's. LF-ET have quite a big range of references in Germany. I have seen a couple of nice functionalities in the tool, which I think are nice for the user. Unfortunately I didn't come to discuss with the guy from LF-ET because I had some small talk with other attendees.

Through the workshop, I got to know about one tool, apparently very recent, called common knowledge studio, an australian company. Although I thought the only australian guys who kick it at a high level were Ruleburs, which was acquired by Haley Ltd. recently this year, common knowledge studion ahs a quite nice approach in many ways similar to the ABRD. Of course, the BPM aspects which are core to the ABRD are not present, and this is all that makes the real difference in the ABRD, besides from the model driven approach whch allows to think of any rule execution engine as a potential execution environment for ABRD rules. The guys from ILOG didn't show up because of some time management problems, which is a pity since these guys have a nice tool I think (although very IT oriented) and I had some targeted questions. But I hope I will get to asking them some time if I make it to meeting them at any other venue.

All in all, the workshop on friday was quite nice for me, we got to show what the very recent ABRD does, and also got me to enrich my mind with odeas from the other colleagues who each do a nice job I think. After summer holiday, I will thake some time on my own and rethink what we are curently doing in the business rules management community as a whole and look for interesting directions of practical research and enhancements. One aspect which I already find exciting is on the methodological level and is about some initiative for agile rule modeling which I was introduced to by the VP Methodology of ILOG. I am looking forward to that.

I'll keep you update with any new things that happen in the ARIS business rule management worls and from a more research perspective too.

Marwane El Kharbili

Learn Project Management in 15 Minutes

This is the title of the free offer by Bar de Baas, the owner of my preferred project management website, SoftwareProjects.Org, actually the only one I have selected the RSS feed of and bookmarked because of the quality of the content. The title sounds like one of those hit and flashy larketing slogans for cheap books. But this shouldn't drive you in an error, underestimating the author and hos website might be a big one. The page to learn project management in 15 minutes contains three videos that'll introduce you to the conceptions of the author about project management. Bas de Baar also has several books to the topics and many many posts on the topic on his dedicated website. I am sure you'll enjoy some pretty entertaining and informative views on project management.

Marwane El Kharbili

Stevens Institute of Technology joins IDS Scheer's Innovation & Education Network

Not much to say, listen to this interview of Prof Michael zur Muehlen on Stevens Institute of Technology being one of 2 canadian intitutions part of the currently 8-members strong IDS Innovation & Education network.


Source: http://howe.stevens.edu/index.php?id=124

Marwane El Kharbili