Day 1 Highlights

The first day of The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference kicked off with a keynote address on the business value and challenges of SOA by John Whitridge, VP Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Architecture Group Information Resources, Marriott International. John 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. According to him, 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.

Maja Tibbling, Lead Enterprise Architect at Con-way, Inc. then delivered a presentation about 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.

Harry Hendrickx of Capgemini, Alex Heublin of HP, Andras Szakal of IBM, and Chris Moyer of EDS 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.

After lunch, Eric Knorr, Executive Editor of InfoWorld Media Group 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.

Robert Roth, Director Shared Development and Services at Intuit then 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.

Toshiro Kawamura, Executive Advisor, NEC Corporation & Chair of Global Business Dialogue 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.

Takashi Kawakami, General Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Global IS Division, Nissan Motor Co. discussed 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.

David Butler, VP and SOA Evangelist at HP 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.

Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group 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.