James J. Odell is a consultant, writer, and educator in the areas of object-oriented and agent-based systems, methodology, business modeling, ontology, and service-oriented architecture (SOA).  Working with the OMG and other standards organizations, he continues to innovate and improve modeling methods and techniques.  He has been the chair of the OMG’s Analysis and Design Task Force for ten years and has participated in the development of the UML 1.0 and UML 2.0.  He is the also acting chair of the OMG's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Task Force, The Open Group’s Adaptive Business Solutions group, and the IEEE FIPA standards committee.

He has co-authored books with James Martin entitled Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (1992), Object-Oriented Methods: Pragmatic Considerations (1996), and Object-Oriented Methods: A Foundation, UML Edition (1998) published by Prentice-Hall. He was the editor of three books on agent-oriented software engineering.  He conducts international seminars and workshops and provides consulting to major companies worldwide.

Presentation
EA and the use of Adaptive Technologies to drive Enterprise Transformation

Over the last couple of years the Internet has had a huge impact on facilitating Boundaryless Information FlowTM. The old hierarchical top-down world has mutated to a flat peer-to-peer interconnected organization where information is available for everybody, and anybody can interact and provide services. In this context, Enterprise Architecture is the main catalyst of enterprise transformation, providing two major IT revolutions: SOA and Web 2.0. SOA aligns business-service requirements with their technological availability, where the need for business agility has become the driving factor of enterprise transformation. Web 2.0 provides a new generation of Internet-based services and emphasizes online collaboration and sharing among users, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. Both of them are about services, but at different levels in the enterprise architecture: SOA at the business layer, and Web 2.0 at the presentation layer.

A variety of technologies can support both SOA and Web 2.0. Among these is agent technology. Agents can be thought of as active objects—i.e., objects having their own thread of control. As such, they are distributed-processing entities that can be reactive, proactive, autonomous, collaborative, and adaptive. Agents work well with other approaches (such as object, relations, components, and so on), as well as support and extend SOA and the Web. Agents can be used as a catalyst for Enterprise Transformation and achieving business advantage in three important ways.

First, agent technology embodies goal orientation as one of its main features. As mentioned above, Enterprise Architecture is not just about technology, it is also about providing business value to the enterprise. A properly architected SOA and Web 2.0 requires that IT be aligned with the goals of the business. In other words, without this goal alignment, IT cannot deliver business value effectively. All agent actions are driven by goals, thus guaranteeing the alignment of IT to business goals.

Second, agent technology brings a dynamic and collaborative character. Since each agent is a distributed process that acts on behalf of itself or another, it can behave much like a social organism. In a fairly static and stable SOA, agents do not have much use; objects and components are adequate. However, when an SOA involves many service requesters and providers that change quickly, conventional SOA approaches no longer scale or respond in a timely manner. Here, new adaptive technologies are required—technologies that are capable of negotiating and collaborating to assemble services, as well as providing contextual, high-value business services. Agent technology is one such approach that provides an excellent solution for dynamically identifying and building business services through collaboration. For example, agent marketplace-style collaboration — already an established standardized agent-based pattern — provides a mechanism for both enhancing service-user experience and delivering optimal solutions in a timely manner. As such agent technology provides the missing link between SOA and Web 2.0, and opens the way to adaptive business solutions—and finally SOA 2.0.

Third, agents can embody intelligent distributed processes that learn and adapt. Enterprise architects are already thinking about the next big thing: Web 3.0. Intelligent agents will process information by its meaning, and provide adaptation to ambiguous and inconsistent requests. Agents will provide meaning not only to data but also to actions and services. In other words, we will have a semantically meaningful environment in which collaborative operation can take place and evolve, rather than in trying to impose central control on all services used by the enterprise. Agents can be ontology driven: they can both reason over ontologies and execute over them. Such an approach is already being applied to the SOA layer that might just pave the way to an SOA 3.0.

Today, agent technology is already accelerating the convergence of SOA and Web 2.0, by providing an adaptive business layer on top of existing Service Oriented Architecture. Agent technology, then, not only provides a solution for SOA 2.0, but sets a solid base for Web 3.0 and also SOA 3.0 by providing meaning driven intelligence layer. Furthermore, agent technology can now accelerate the enterprise transformation by supplying enterprise architects with tools and methods that provide real business value.

Join us at the Adaptive Business Solutions Workgroup, to find out more about agent technology and how it can assist your enterprise architects accelerate enterprise transformations by providing more adaptive business solutions. Learn how agents can be used as a catalyst for Enterprise Transformation and achieving business advantage.

return to program