At Merck Serono International, Serge Thorn is in charge of IT Research and Innovation (a function which consist of motivating, encouraging creativity, and innovation in the IT Units), with a mission to help to deploy an Enterprise Architecture, taking into account the company IT Governance Framework and the IT Pharma Communication.

He was previously in charge of the reorganization of the IT Department, implementing Service Management based on ITIL Best Practices and deploying new processes such as Change, Configuration, and Release Management, and was responsible for the Disaster Recovery Plan and for the System Management team.

Prior to this, he was responsible of the Architecture team in an international bank, having a wide experience in the deployment and management of information systems in Private Banking, and also in IT architectures domains such as the Internet, dealing rooms, inter-banking networks, and Middle and Back-office.

Serge Thorn is also the Chairman of the itSMF (IT Service Management forum) Swiss chapter.

Presentation
The Relationship Between IT Service Management and SOA

Is IT Service Management an emerging subset of SOA? There is a high level of correlation between success at SOA and commitment to ITIL.  ITIL is a standardized approach and series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management. This customizable framework defines how ITSM is applied within an organization, covering processes such as service desk management, incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management, and release management among others.

Service oriented architecture is an architecture that allows to loosely couple capabilities that can be described as reusable services to support a business process. Processes such as availability management, change management or release management "are just business processes that are particular to IT". We now use this service-oriented architecture to link the business processes associated with IT, with the technology components that make up the IT infrastructure to an integrated platform that includes a configuration management database, an enterprise service bus, and a process orchestration layer. So we can think of IT service management as another use case or usage scenario for SOA. This session will cover Merck Serono's roadmap and reflections in these two domains.

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