Year 2009 in Retrospect
I usually have my gaze firmly in the future, but on this last day of the year, I found myself gratefully reflecting on all that has happened during the last 12 months. It has been a busy year, very hectic at times, but fortunately also had some breathing room for contemplation and innovation.
This has now been my second year as an independent consultant. Whereas the first year was characterized by envisioning the future while securing the necessities of business, this year has been about starting to translate these ideas into concrete structures and features.
This year, I have also been employed as a researcher on a part-time basis, which has catalyzed my conceptual-analytical thinking to a great extent and provided a sounding board for my ideas.
At the most superficial level, my year can be summarized as follows:
January: For the whole month, I had my nose on the grindstone in a customer engagement that had begun in October. The first phase of the project ended at the end of the month.
February: I decided to extend my contract, but took the first two weeks off from the project to have a mini-holiday and to attend to some errands and appointments that had been pending. As a perfect opportunity showed itself mid month, I made a major strategic move and decided to rent an office in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My article “Agility Calls for Maturity” was published on BPTrends.
March: For the last three months, I had been quite occupied with planning and organizing SOLEA 2009 symposium. The event took place on March 19 and went really well. On the following week, I attended Holacracy training in the Netherlands. On the same trip, I also finalized the rental agreement for the new office.
April: The project was in full swing. Mid month, SOA SIG organized a seminar on Web-Oriented Architecture, and on the following week, I was speaking at IIR’s SOA seminar on SOA governance.
May: This was a hectic month with both the project work and academic work coming to a head.
June: Attended a networking event in Belgium and EAC 2009 in London. The project kept me busy until midsummer, then there was a summer break of five weeks. I was mostly chilling out, but also found time to co-author an academic paper.
July: Spent a well-deserved holiday week in French Riviera. Back to the project at the end of the month.
August: A relaxed yet productive month after the holidays.
September: Really busy in the project. There was no time for research work, but I gave a lecture on Master Data Management and Data Governance.
October: This was the last month of my contract that with several extensions had lasted for twelve months. On the first day of the month, SOA SIG co-organized a seminar on Model-Driven Architecture and Domain-Specific Modeling, featuring some renowned speakers. In October, I was also asked to start writing a new blog.
November: In early November, I was presenting an academic paper in ECMLG 2009 Conference in Athens, Greece. Also took a few days off for holiday there, before making a business trip to London. Started to write a book.
December: On December 4, I held again my one-day training seminar on EA, BPM and SOA. After that, I have been writing the book and planning a leadership workshop.
I look forward to 2010 and hope the new year will be as productive and expansive as this one has been!
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