Lauren States is Vice President of Skills and Capabilities on the IBM Client Value Team. As a member of IBM's Integration and Values Leadership Team, Lauren is leading the transformation of roles and skills necessary to enable execution of IBM's new client-facing model championed by the Client Value Initiative. Lauren's new role extends her sales enablement and skill building capabilities across the IBM Corporation.

Prior to this new role, Lauren was Vice President of Technical Sales and Sales Enablement in IBM Software Group. She was responsible for IBM’s sales force enablement, technical sales support and customer software deployment across IBM’s $16 billion software business. She provided direction and leadership to IBM software’s 14,000-member field sales and technical sales support teams globally. In this role, she managed sales force productivity and talent development. She also directed a 5,000+ technical sales organization, comprised of software architects and product specialists. Her team was responsible for the client experience with IBM software.

Lauren joined IBM in 1978 as a systems engineer in New York City. Since that time, she has managed teams of both sales and technical professionals covering a broad range of industries. She has remained focused throughout her career on increasing IBM clients’ understanding of the value of technology and its innovative application to their businesses.

Lauren joined IBM’s client/server emerging business team in 1991, with responsibility for developing new markets. Later she led IBM’s Midwest sales territory, delivering e-business solutions to large and small enterprises.

In 1998, she was named technical assistant to Nicholas Donofrio, IBM's executive vice president for Innovation and Technology. Subsequently, Lauren was named director of technical sales support for the Americas software sales organization, responsible for software pre-sales technical support, software services and software support offerings.

Lauren graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School with a Bachelor of Science degree. She is a member of the IBM Integration and Values Team which is comprised of IBM’s top 300 executives. She is also a member of the IBM Technical Leadership Team which is responsible for the development and advancement of IBM’s 200,000+ technical workforce. As a role model and mentor to women and minorities around the world, Lauren chairs the IBM Multicultural Women in Technology Council and co-chairs the IBM United States Women’s Council. She also leads the Black Executive Network for the manufacturing and development divisions. She is a member of the Board of Visitors for Northeastern University College of Business.

In 2003, Lauren received the Multicultural Women in Technology Award from Career Communications Group, Inc., in recognition of outstanding managerial leadership. In 2006, she was recognized as one of the 25 Most Influential Black Women in American Business by The Network Journal. She was also named one of the Top 100 Blacks in Technology in 2006 by Career Communications Group, Inc. She and her husband Kenneth J. Creary serve as IBM co-chairs of National Black Family Technology Awareness Week. Their teenage daughter Rachel is an avid technologist.

Presentation
Technology, Methodology and an Independent Assessment of Enterprise Architects
The current economic and global realities are driving an inordinate number of mergers and acquisitions. In a globalized economy with cross-border mergers and acquisitions it is becoming increasingly important to have flexible infrastructures that can adapt and change with relative ease. This requires that we start looking at business strategy for the enterprise and align IT initiatives to support that business strategy.

Looking at enterprise IT strategy in conjunction with business strategy, enterprise architecture, is a very intricate task that cannot be done in isolation without some structure around it and supporting methodology. Technology and standards have evolved to enable support for services at the business level rather than at a funcional level. This requires enterprise architects who are creative and yet capable of ensuring that they provide a robust architecture that addresses governance, deployment and management.

The industry has a definite dearth of architects that can perform at this level. We need an independent way to assess the skills of architects so that when an organization hires an individual they can be relatively certain about the quality and type of skills they are hiring.

This is what this conference addresses, the technology , the methodology and how OpenGroup can help in an independent assessment of the practitioners to help individuals and organizations.