Well, my first blog of the new year.  I'll tell you something, the holiday season brings with it so much family time and other frenzied activity that I have been remiss in posting.  But that will change as the new year brings some exciting developments in technology, standards and service oriented architecture. 

Now I'm a firm believer in goal setting and resolution making.  I'm not saying that I'm perfect at keeping all the goals that I set, but my view is that if you never set any, you'll never be able to measure what you did or didn't accomplish.  In any event, one of the things that I do every year at this time is to look at my finances, my investments, my debts and so on, and set some goals, re-balance my portfolio and get on track for the new year.  A few years ago, I got my hands on a tool that has changed the way that I view my finances.  You see, I'm a really visual person, pictures say about 10,000 words for me.  This tool, written by Impact Technologies (http://www.advancedimpact.com) is a set of stencils and web services for Visio that allows me to visually model my accounts and cash flow over a period of time, coupled with web service stock look ups and Monte Carlo Simulations for investment return and so forth.  What I end up with is a graphical flowchart with the ability to see where my money goes from account to account and the ability to run that model over a period of years as well as output EVERYTHING to Excel showing month by month transactions between all accounts.  They called this tool Financial Canvas.  And like I do every year at this time, I used it again to model the next few years.  Now, with any confidence in the stock market (sheesh, did anyone else feel bloodied by this last week?) things might be looking good.

But the whole experience got me thinking, yet again, about the way that I deal with my financial institutions.  I can model the crap out of my finances, but in the end it's all up to me to execute that model.  I have to transfer the funds, sell the stocks and pay the bills.  What I'd really like to be able to do is have a standardized model that I can hand to my bank and brokerage and just say "just do this", and have them do it.  They would automatically create limit orders for stocks as per the model, transfer the funds when appropriate, etc.  And this is the exact value of an implementation of standards.  For a system to be able to identify "objects" as accounts or stock owned, and workflow in a standardized manner.  Using service orientation, the executors of that "plan" would then also make a pick list of transactions available that would facilitate interaction between those objects.

And now, my plea...this is a personal passion of mine.  In the work that we do with financial companies, we long for the day when the object, transaction, and workflow can come together in a flexible manner.  And all for the CUSTOMER, to add value to the way that they get a return on their investment.  Is there anyone willing to take on this challenge and step up to be a leader in flexible customer service?  Time will tell, I suppose. 

Happy New Year to all and please watch for exciting blogs and updates here on this site.

- Josh