Mr. Szakal is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of IBM's Federal Software business unit. He is also an IBM Senior Certified Software IT Architect and an IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer. His responsibilities include developing e-Government software architectures using IBM middleware and leading the IBM federal government software IT architect team.

Mr. Szakal holds undergraduate degrees in Biology and Computer Science and a Masters Degree in Computer Science from James Madison University.

Mr. Szakal has been a driving force behind IBM's adoption of government IT standards and is a member of the IBM Software Group Strategy Team. The team he leads has been responsible for helping the federal government move e-Government into the On-Demand era through the application of SOA. His team has been directly involved with multiple, high-profile, successful government software and services engagements based on open standards and open source.

Mr. Szakal represents IBM SWG on the Board of Directors of The Open Group. He currently holds the Chair of the IT Architect Profession Certification Standard (ITAC) within the Open Group.

Presentation

Using The Open Group's SOA Maturity Model (OSIMM) to Reduce Risk in Your SOA Roadmap

Unless you have been incommunicado for the last few years, it is no secret that SOA has swept through the IT world. The industry has evolved to a shared services model. SOA is the preferred architectural style for desiging, deploying and governing shared services.The business advantages of making IT flexible and miscible have been apparent in theory and in practice to an increasing number of firms in every industry and every region of the world. What has happened, therefore, is that SOA has been adopted with something of the ferocity and vigor that the Internet was a few years ago especially in light of cloud computing. The companies that have done so understand that SOA and service orientation has the same power to transform them – to reduce costs aand extend the life of existing IT assets, but most important, to introduce true innovation in products and services, in operations, and above all, perhaps, business models – as the Internet. The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) is a tool that facilitates the adoption and integration of service orientation – to givee some order, coherence, and standardization to the adoption and use of SOA and shared services. This session will provide an overview of the current version of OSIMM and how to use the model to facilitate the integration and realization of shared services through the adoption of SOA.

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