Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conference
San Diego
Objective of Meeting
The Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conferences are organized by enterprise architecture practitioners, for enterprise architecture practitioners, and for those
directly involved in the management and oversight of enterprise
architecture.
The Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conference at San Diego
addressed some of the key issues and challenges that face enterprise
architects today. In this highly practical three-day conference and series
of workshops, members and non-members of The Open Group alike came together to share insights and perspectives on
best practices in enterprise architecture, and the key issues and challenges that
enterprise architects face
today.
The conference underlined the continuing role of The Open Group in providing a
truly global forum in which enterprise architects from all sectors of the industry can come
together to discuss best practice in enterprise architecture, hone their skills,
find new ways to solve problems, share experiences, and learn from each other.
Summary
The agenda for this Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conference covered
87 individual presentations, structured into a plenary plus 11 streams across up to 4 parallel
tracks.
The event provided a wealth of current case study and tutorial material,
summarized below.
Day 1 - Opening Plenary: Focus on SOA
The conference plenary focused on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
The early-adopters of SOA are starting to review their experience, and
satisfaction runs high: according to a recent report by Forrester, nearly
70% of SOA users say that they will increase their use.
So SOA is here to stay. What does this mean for enterprise architects?
Many of the guiding principles of SOA are not new. Re-use,
interoperability, and compliance to standards have been championed by the
experts and member companies of The Open Group Architecture Forum for more
than 11 years. But it is becoming increasingly clear that, while the
fundamental principles remain valid, SOA does require new ideas and new
skills.
Service-orientation has even deeper implications. It can lead to new
business models and organizational structures. It helps the architect to
think in terms of an enterprise architecture that includes IT, rather than
an IT architecture that supports the enterprise. All of which means that
architects must not just master the new technology. They must understand
business and technology together, in order to deliver true enterprise
architecture.
The plenary meeting aimed to review experience with SOA to date, take
stock of its implications for the future, and help CIOs, enterprise
architects, and strategists to understand how SOA is being and can be used
for business advantage.
The plenary featured a number of important presentations covering case
studies of SOA deployment, business drivers and models for SOA, and the
impact of SOA on enterprise architecture:
Keynote: Business Value and Challenges of SOA John Whitridge, VP, Enterprise Architecture, Marriott
International
John opened the first day of the conference with a keynote address on the business
value and challenges of SOA. He shared Marriott’s thought
process, planning steps, and implementation stages to SOA. Key lessons
learned by Marriott to date include the importance of establishing
executive-level sponsorship and identifying your organization’s SOA
benefits upfront; the need to define your SOA path and anticipate
changes; and the significance of defining appropriate operations
service level agreements. Throughout his presentation, John
emphasized that SOA technology alone is not sufficient to achieve SOA
benefits. He explained that SOA value can only come when
all stakeholders within an organization are property educated,
understand the value, and are aware of the potential road blocks and
risks.
The Sky is the Limit - SOA Built on a Solid Foundation Maja Tibbling, Lead Enterprise Architect, Con-way Inc. Maiagave
a presentation on the tangible business results and ROI her $4.2
billion organization has realized as a result of SOA. Maja explained
how Con-way, an early adopter of SOA, navigated many technical and
organizational challenges to establish a systematic approach to create
and identify business services. In her case study presentation, she
discussed why continuous attention to the "A" in SOA
implementation is critical if it is to serve as a basis for
event-driven processing, automated business processes, real-time
business intelligence and other future IT opportunities. She also
addressed how the Con-way business has already benefited, and detailed
the steps taken to ensure these award-winning results.
PANEL: The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) Harry Hendrickx, Capgemini; Alex Heublin, HP; Andras Szakal,
IBM; Chris Moyer, EDS The members of the panel announced The Open Group’s plans
to develop the industry’s first collaborative maturity model for SOA
adoption - The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM).
Spearheaded by these and other members of The Open Group, the
initiative is working to provide an industry recognized maturity model
for advancing the adoption of SOA within and across businesses. All
panelists agreed that end-user perspective is critical to the future
development of an industry-wide SOA maturity model. More information
on OSIMM and how to get involved can be found at www.opengroup.org/projects/osimm.
PANEL: SOA Innovation - Breaking SOA Bottlenecks Eric Knorr, Executive Director, InfoWorld Media Group Eric moderated a panel discussion among leading solutions and services
providers at HP, IBM, SAP, and BEA on how to break SOA bottlenecks.
All new enterprise technology initiatives are battles against
institutional inertia, and that goes double for SOA, since it has the
potential to affect the entire IT infrastructure. The panel explored
the barriers that commonly stymie SOA initiatives – i.e., selling the
value of SOA up the food chain, securing funds for an SOA initiative,
governance, avoiding vendor lock-in, and bridging the skills gap –
and offered practical advice on how to overcome them.
Intuit's Journey to SOA Maturity Robert Roth, Director, Shared Development & Services, Intuit Robert
presented on Intuit's growth in the application of SOA from 2003 to
date, discussing some of the services they have in production today,
how his company defined them, technologies used, and several lessons
learned along the way. One of the primary lessons learned was the
importance of always tying back an SOA initiative to the original
business goals. Another big finding was that getting XML to be
re-usable, flexible, and support SOA principles is incredibly
challenging. SOA really requires specialist skills and a new way of
thinking.
Issues of Global
eCommerce and NEC's NGN (Next Generation
Network) Vision Toshiro Kawamura, Executive Advisor, NEC Corporation &
Chair of Global Business Dialogue Toshiro discussed the concept of “dynamic
collaboration” and how it is propelling NEC’s vision for Next
Generation Networks (NGNs). He provided the audience with
details on how NEC is leveraging SOA to integrate its multiple
different businesses, partners, and customers.
Direction of Global Enterprise Architecture, TOGAF, & SOA Takashi Kawakami, General Manager, Enterprise Architecture,
Global IS Division, Nissan Motor Co. Takashidiscussed the evolution and
future direction of enterprise architecture within his global
organization. He described enterprise architecture at Nissan as an
alignment of business and IT strategy. Nissan is promoting global
standardization to improve the agility of its global business units,
and enterprise architecture is one of the key methods to achieve this
goal. He described Nissan’s information capitalization and
portfolio optimization approaches in detail, as they are key pieces of
Nissan’s enterprise architecture roadmap.
SOA and the Agile
Warfighter: The DoD Net-Centric Enterprise
Services (NCES) Program David Butler, VP and SOA Evangelist, HP David delivered a
presentation on the Department of Defense (DoD) Net-Centric Enterprise
Services (NCES) initiative, one of the largest and most advanced SOA
initiatives to date. The program links combat and other armed services
personnel, logistics, business, intelligence, and command centers to
facilitate information sharing, accelerate decision-making, and
improve operations. David explained how the DoD is leveraging SOA
with the NCES program to facilitate secure, agile, dependable,
interoperable data-sharing, where warfighters, business, and
intelligence users share knowledge on a global network. The
presentation also explained how issues around SOA governance,
effective collaboration, and policy management/enforcement are being
addressed.
Launch: Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group Allen closed out
the day by officially launching the Association of Open Group
Enterprise Architects (AOGEA). Allen, along with distinguished
guests Bill Coleman and Dawn Meyerriecks, and founding AOGEA chapter
member Jason Uppal, explained the significance of the Association for
individual practitioners and the industry alike. At launch, the AOGEA
registered 739 Open Group certified practitioners as founding members.
For more information on the AOGEA or to become a member, visit www.aogea.org.
The conference streams at San Diego provided experience-based insight into the approaches and
methods that have proved most effective for developing architectures around the
world.
The various conference streams delivered innovative viewpoints,
practical insights, and case study presentations by a diverse range of
enterprise architecture professionals from both vendor and customer organizations.
These streams took a highly practical, hands-on approach, combining presentations and
discussions on best practices with interactive workshops, case study reviews, and
demonstrations of the latest tools.
PANEL SESSION: SOA 2.0 Moderator: Ron Tolido, CTO Northern Europe Asia Pacific,
Capgemini
Panelists: Stuart Boardman, CGI; David Houlding, Perot
Systems; Mats Gejnevall, Capgemini
TUTORIAL: Leveraging TOGAF in the SAP Enterprise Architecture
Framework Franck Lopez, Global Director, Enterprise (SOA) Architecture,
SAP
Oleg Figlin, Snr. Solution Architect, SSM Solution Office, SAP (UK)
Analysis of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and the
US Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) Judith Jones, Architecting-the-Enterprise Limited (UK)
TUTORIAL: An Applicant’s View of the IT Architect Certification
(ITAC) Process James de Raeve, VP Certification, The Open Group
Moderated Discussion: The IT Architect Certification (ITAC)
Process James de Raeve, VP Certification, The Open Group
STREAM #7: Enterprise Architecture and Business Value Realization
Actionable EA Principles for Business Value Realization Vish Viswanathan, CC&C Solutions (Australia)
EA Product Focus Delivers Value Paul van der Merwe, Real IRM Solutions (South Africa)
EA and ITIL - Implications of ITIL-ITSM Framework & IT
Processes for EA Development Rajesh Radhakrishnan, Senior IT Architect & Senior Managing
Consultant, Global Technology Services Group, IBM
STREAM #8: WORKSHOP - Enterprise Architecture and Academia
The presentations, tutorials, and workshops at the meeting, and the associated
discussions and panel sessions, all provided participants with a wealth of
experience-based insight into current best practice in enterprise
architecture, from leading
experts and practitioners around the world.
Participants at this unique event were able to:
Participate in highly practical workshops and tutorials teaching best
enterprise architecture practices
Review case studies from organizations who have put theory into practice, and learn from
them what works and what doesn't
See demonstrations and presentations on leading tools supporting open architecture
methods
Network with leading architecture experts, vendors, and peers in the
enterprise architecture field
Next Steps
This Eleventh Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference was a great success,
confirming the global need for this unique series of events.
Interested in presenting at Mumbai, Cape
Town, Paris, or other Enterprise Architecture
Practitioners' Conferences? Contact John
Spencer, APC Manager at The Open Group.
