Day 2 Highlights

The second day of The Open Group IT Architecture Practitioners Conference was exceptional in that it offered five key streams for conference attendees: enterprise architecture development, architecture management: setting up an architecture practice, service oriented architectures, architecting to the edge, and agent technologies. The widespread viewpoints represented at these diverse streams were met with much enthusiasm by the attendees.

Sean Chang and Sandeep Kulkarni, of the Clorox Company, presented on the innovation-driven architecture where they discussed their experiences of building an enterprise architecture practice at Clorox. From a business perspective, Clorox is incredibly focused on innovation and the IS organization recognized the need for the discipline of an enterprise architecture framework to match the company's business innovations. Their presentation reiterated a common conference theme – that enterprise architecture is intrinsically linked to how a company can improve the way they do business.

Following this was a very interesting presentation from Klaus Peltsch (Director of Architecture at Ontario Lottery & Gaming), in which he highlighted the evolution of enterprise architecture within his own organization, including that they are working to establish a partnership between IT and business to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of both business and IT activities. He also defined five critical success factors in order to accomplish Ontario Lottery & Gaming's enterprise architecture mission that resonated with the crowd.

Tony Carrato (Executive IT Architect, Enterprise Integration Solutions, IBM) spoke about SOA anti-patterns, or as he defined it "a known not-to-work solution to a problem". He presented an eye-opening number of ways on how not to implement an SOA.

James de Raeve (VP Certification, The Open Group) also presented a practical guide to becoming an Open Group Certified IT Architect, focusing his presentation on the applicant's perspective, which was met with much enthusiasm by the audience.

Dr. Christopher Harding (Head of the SOA Working Group, The Open Group) outlined The Open Group's perspective that for SOA, standards mean a framework for SOA, that it is based on ontology, and enables model-driven interface definition and implementations.

A panel discussion led by SOA luminaries from the Integration Consortium, OASIS, OMG, The Open Group, and moderated by Ed Harrington (Executive VP & COO, Data Access Technologies) challenged the audience's perspective on what standards mean for SOA.

The stream on agent technologies: enabling the intelligent enterprise, represented the Agent Technologies Forum, which is being established to assist the development and deployment of agent technology in an enterprise environment and included a half day of presentations from Andy Muholland (Global CTO, Capgemini) who presented a keynote on the link between architecture, services, and the needs of a business. This track also included a presentation focused on agents, and what are they doing for us now from James Odell (Senior Research Scientist, Intelligent Automation).