Day 2 Highlights

The second day of The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference marked the beginning of multiple streams focusing on different aspects of enterprise architecture – including SOA; updates and practical advice on using TOGAF™; and how it all relates to development, management, business transformation, business value realization, and academia.

Kicking off the SOA track was Hong Zhang, Director and Chief Architect, Emerging Technologies, Chief Systems and Technology Office (CSTO), General Motors. He shared GM's challenges, key findings, and success stories in creating a corporate vision covering business architecture, SOA, technology architecture, and an implementation roadmap, as well as how to align these key architectures to form a complete enterprise architecture for business transformation and success.

Next up was Dean Griffin, Partner at Accenture who showcased ten things enterprise architects must get right to implement an SOA…or as he put it – if SOA is the answer then what is the question…Dean also went on to outline his view of what SOA is and what it is not. Rounding out the morning’s SOA stream was Brad Mercer, Principal Architect at MITRE Corporation who talked about how the US Navy is transforming to SOA, or moving from systems to services. The Department of the US Navy FY07 budget is 130 billion USD and has over 500,000 personnel, making SOA implementation uniquely satisfying and challenging on a massive scale.

Mid-morning sessions across all streams ranged from case studies to how to get the most out of SOA and the way it interacts as part of a larger EA and IT leadership. In particular, Yan Zhao, Director, Enterprise and Solutions Architecture, Public Sector Health, CGI Federal discussed how enterprise architecture and SOA can complement each other. In another presentation, Eli Rosner, CIO, Mitchell International, a solutions provider for the automotive insurance, collision repair, medical claims, and glass replacement industries, talked about Mitchell’s SOA, post-implementation, and how Mitchell realized application performance management is a necessity. Following Eli was a presentation from Tony Carrato, Lead Architect, Asia/Pacific, EIS SOA Advanced Technology, IBM Software Group on performance modeling for SOA.

The afternoon was filled with a variety of presentations from Architecting the Enterprise, CGI, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, The Open Group leaders and Marriott International’s Steve Wolf, Senior Enterprise Architect. Steve examined service-oriented maturity models for SOA, using his in-depth knowledge to provide real-world insight into various Marriott SOA initiatives, in particular giving audience members a glimpse into the Marriott Service Oriented Maturity Model.

In addition, there were presentations by Capgemini, Applied Technology Solutions, CC&C Solutions, Real IRM Solutions, IBM, University of Reading, UK, and the FEAC Institute. In particular, David Houlding, an Enterprise Architect at Perot Systems Healthcare discussed the evolution of SOA and Web 2.0 – in particular noting that these are driving forces shaping enterprise architectures today. His presentation also explored Software as a Service (SaaS) and key challenges along with practical recommendations including the importance of service decomposition and interface design, isolating dependencies behind service interfaces for agility, as well as security, licensing, and network and remote service availability.