Bob joined IBM in May, 2006 in the Enterprise Integration Solutions group, focusing on support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance for worldwide IBM customers.

Bob has 22 years of experience in the telecom industry at MCI and then Verizon Business. He was the MCI chief architect for 3 years, leading the enterprise architecture group and working across the entire order to cash suite of applications.

Prior to his role as MCI Chief Architect, Bob specialized in the areas of product development as well as Network support systems. He has driven the strategy, planning, and execution of MCI's product development area, in the area of contact centers, IP/VPN, VOIP, and managed services. In the Network IT development area, Laird has been a leader in such successful MCI programs as MECCA for automated Network Provisioning, Real Time Restoration (RTR) for automated Network Restoration, as well as Network Management systems.

Prior to coming to MCI, Laird worked as a consultant for American Management Systems (AMS) and Ideation, Inc. He has MS and BS degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University and has been granted two patents in the area of telephony. He has spoken at various industry forums and been quoted in CIO Insight, Telecommunications, Infoworld and Computerworld.

Presentation
SOA Governance - from Theory to Reality

There has been a large amount of information put forth on the subject of SOA Governance. In the crucible of actually performing an SOA Governance engagement with a client who is seeking real information that will be useful for them, it is necessary to have a toolkit of methods and approaches and then craft them for the particular problem at hand. The speaker has real life experience from both sides of the equation, as a customer and as a consultant. He will report on a specific case study, and augment that with his overall SOA Governance observations.

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