The Open Group’s 17th Architecture Practitioners Conference kicked
off on Monday, January 28 in San Francisco. Industry leaders from near
and far convened at The Fairmont Hotel in Nob Hill to share their
insights on the day’s theme of "Leveraging SOA in Enterprise
Architecture".
Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group, gave opening
remarks – announcing that membership in the Association of Open Group
Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) has surpassed 5,000 since launching one
year ago. Also, the past year was a successful year for membership
within The Open Group, with the addition of two new Platinum Members:
Sun Microsystems and HSBC Bank.
Following Allen’s opening remarks, Lauren States, Vice
President of Skills and Capabilities on the IBM Client Value Team,
delivered her presentation, "Technology, Methodology, and an
Independent Assessment of Enterprise Architects". In her address,
Lauren talked about the increased pressure to compete in this
global market and the need to drive growth and efficiency. She suggested
that SOA is important to businesses right now because of the current
state of the economy, its ability to ultimately reduce costs internally,
and architectural reality. With an increase of companies aligning their
IT and business strategies, the enterprise architect is now chartered
with building an architecture that addresses governance, deployment, and
management. Lauren reiterated that we need a way to measure the skills
of architects and suggested developing an architect standard as a tool.
She complimented The Open Group on its work in this area, specifically
the ITAC and ITSC (IT Specialist Certification) standards.
Delivering the keynote was David Linthicum, Managing Partner,
ZapThink, LLC. David is a thought leader in SOA with over 800
articles and columns, his weekly blog, podcasts, and books. He brought
his real-world consulting insight to the event with his presentation,
"Leveraging the SOA in Enterprise Architecture". David
reminded us that today’s IT troubles are nothing new. We’ve had IT
challenges for years, but now we have SOA as a solution which, if
developed and implemented properly, is well worth the effort and cost
up-front. For those organizations who could benefit from SOA, and he was
clear to point out that this is not for everyone, you should approach
SOA the same way you would "eat an elephant" – one bite at a
time. To get David’s perspective on the opening day, check out his InfoWorld
blog.
Additional coverage of Day 1 can be found as follows:
- "Time for a ‘stimulus package’ for SOA",
ZDNet, by Joe McKendrick, January 28, 2008
- "Open Group Enterprise Architecture Conference – Day 1",
Mike Walker’s Blog, January 28, 2008
- "SOA Dollars and Sense",
OnStrategies Perspectives, by Tony Baer, January 29, 2008
Following this, the "SOA Reality Check" panel was moderated
by Eric Knorr, Editor in Chief for InfoWorld.com. This
powerhouse panel included well-known industry analysts and experts: Tony
Baer, Principal Analyst, OnStrategies; Dr. Chris Harding, Forum Director
for SOA & Semantic Interoperability at The Open Group; Joe McKendrick,
ZDNet blogger; David Linthicum, Managing Partner, ZapThink; and Thomas
Morgan, Enterprise Architect, Autodesk. The panel covered issues
from when and why to undertake SOA, which organizations will be most
vulnerable in a recession, why SOA is not a solution in a box, to
information interoperability, mashups, BPM, BI, and restful services.
SOA Working Group members
Tony Carrato, World-Wide Chief Operations
Architect, EIS SOA Advanced Technology, IBM, and SOA Working Group
Co-chair,
and Mats Gejnevall, Certified Enterprise Architect, Capgemini,
SOA Working Group Co-chair and SOA Governance Project Co-chair,
provided the audience with an overview of the SOA Working Group. Mats explained that the SOA Working Group was formed because they
wanted to know what impact SOA would have on doing infrastructure work.
They also shared insight into a few new projects underway including
creating a practical guide for the enterprise architect implementing
TOGAF. The efforts of the Working Group are beneficial to the community
and not just the immediate members. Look for their project roadmaps
online over the next few weeks.
Kicking off the afternoon’s SOA track was Minoru Terao, Sr. VP,
Enterprise Solution Business Unit, NEC. Minoru spoke in detail
about "Security Architecture in the SOA Era", sharing several
insights about the state of the communications, ecommerce, and online
trading markets in Japan. With a booming economy, the Japanese
government and NEC are involved in exciting projects around
SOA adoption, dependability, and security risks.
In the TOGAF track, Awel Dico, Bank of Montreal (Canada) and
Co-chair for an SOA/TOGAF practical guide project at The Open Group,
addressed the synergies between SOA and TOGAF in his presentation,
"Delivering SOA with TOGAF". Awel highlighted a few
"how-to" key points for the audience related to enhancing
TOGAF in order to support SOA.
Back in the SOA track, David P. Butler, Chief SOA Evangelist, HP
Software (US), shared valuable industry feedback about the challenges
his customers experienced and the strategies that enabled them to
transform their infrastructure by implementing SOA and data center
infrastructure service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) in his presentation
"Architecting for SOA and SOI".
In the Architecture Profession track, Charles Jobson, Manager of
the Enterprise Architecture Team, AB Volvo (Sweden), examined how
enterprise architecture is defined at Volvo. Charles explained that Volvo’s IT organization
is set up based on governance, demand, and supply. As a result, Volvo is
able to leverage enterprise architecture as a strategic tool to the
Volvo Group Business. Key to Volvo’s enterprise architecture success story has been their
establishment of a Corporate Integration Office.
In the last TOGAF track presentation of the day, Mike Walker,
Architecture Strategist, Global Financial Services, Microsoft (US),
shared trends such as moving away from code and moving toward
proliferation, and how organizations are pushing relevant information
‘into the cloud’ in his presentation, "A Practitioner’s Guide
to SOA". Mike also gave conference attendees a glimpse into a
new Microsoft business process alliance that will soon become available
online.
