Project: ALM Community


  • Client: ALM Community
  • Date: 2011-Present
Abstract:

The ALM-Community looks at improving various aspects of ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).

Most IT competencies (BA, Test, Development, Operations, etc) are involved in the development and maintenance throughout the lifecycle of applications. The ALM-Community recognises this and invites all competencies to join and help solve the cross-competency challenges.

Any organisation can have a (free of charge) on-premise instances of the Standards Library. Any processes that are specific to that company can be customised, while still receiving updates of the other processes and IT Best Practices from the ALM-Community.

More achievements

In December 2011, Stephan has initiated something that he called the "Global ALM Community". Much groundwork was needed for this unique community to collaborate and grow to become truly global with many participants.

The vision of the ALM-Community is to create and maintain a "WikiPedia of IT Best Practices" (aka Standards Library). The community achieves this through capturing results of meetings, re-using opinions found on the internet and through applying research results.

The standards library consists of everything that helps IT Organisations go faster, better and/or cheaper. It presents that content in a single location with an intuitive interaction flow that allows the user to easily find the information that he/she is after with as little clicks as possible.

While analysing other similar initiatives in the past, Stephan realised that fundamental flaws prevented them to be long lived. The major reasons are:

  • It requires massive amounts of resources to keep up to date with the latest technology releases. The maintenance of the "Single Source of Truth" cannot be maintained by a single organisation as that would rely on individuals. (A senior leader sponsoring the strategy for instance).
  • No two IT organisation are equal and therefore every internal process will also be unique. To succeed, a long lived standards library needs to cater for these (extensive) customisations. You might find it interesting that viewed over a longer period of time, the amount of customisations of participating organisations is inversely correlated to the success of the standards library.

Stephan has managed to find solutions to both these issues and is now focussing to grow the community using this innovative approach. Several organisations, including National Australia Bank have local implementations of the library and the collaboration across the industry is starting to happen.

As this involves many IT competencies, Stephan is working closely with the other community leads in Melbourne. He is often seen in various meetings and conferences spreading the word, like his presentation at Tech-Ed Australia 2012, SEPG Asia Pacific 2012 and LAST Conference 2012.



Continue reading: Stephan's portfolio


Contact Stephan via:stephan@stephandekker.com+61(0)4-59812459, or social media (Below)