Simon Carpenter is Director, Strategic Initiatives at SAP Africa, (Pty) Ltd. This entails thought leadership on emerging business and technology issues, positioning the company, developing new markets and bringing to market SAP’s latest solutions by leading a team of Industry and Solution experts. The hot topic of the day is ensuring readiness for the emerging SOA paradigm and SAP’s Business Process Platform.

He has 24 years of experience in the IT sector and has worked predominantly in the area of business solutions (ranging from on-board computing and transport management to large-scale ERP and SCM systems).He has broad experience, having worked in sales, marketing, support management, project management, consulting and systems development roles.

Simon believes in two facts:firstly, it is not about the technology is - it is the people whom you lead, empower and enable with the technology who make business happen; secondly, technology has to serve the business by adding value. The focus should always be on strategic and tactical business impact first and technology second.

Presentation
Business Transformation, EA Deployment and Value Realization
Businesses do not buy technology because they like technology. They buy it to get a job of work done and in the case of applications software that job is to enable the business processes that actually execute organizational strategy.

In the past, the focus was on making business processes more efficient by integrating various activities into a seamless flow and by automating them wherever possible. This was the dominant world view in the heyday of ERP systems

Today organizations are chasing growth through innovation and differentiation, and the focus is much more on process effectiveness and flexibility (without losing sight of the “old” requirements).

This session will look at the impacts that SOA is going to have on the business of building effective and efficient business processes. These impacts include; better collaboration between IT and business, end-to-end processes across business boundaries and the new skills bias that we will have to address

return to program