Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

Creating an SOA Pilot with Enterprise Architecture

John Williams, Enterprise Architect, QBE Regional Insurance

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept that promises cost savings, increased agility and improved time to market. Enterprise architecture is the key to helping SOA achieve these objectives. This seminar focuses on the steps to creating a successful SOA pilot. Understand which aspects of SOA are important to include in your pilot. Learn how enterprise architecture can help you get the most value from the pilot. Discover how to use the pilot as the basis for delivering ongoing value to the business.

Key Issues
• Learn how to use enterprise architecture to create a successful SOA pilot
• Understand which aspects of SOA are important to pilot
• Discover how to extract the most business value from your pilot
• Learn how use your pilot to begin developing a reuse program

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | 3:15 - 4:30 PM

SOA or Business Architecture: Who's on First?

Brenda Michelson, Principal Consultant, Elemental Links

For years, organizations have been retrofitting business processes and interactions in order to conform to rigid IT solutions. With SOA as an architectural base, complemented by EDA and BPM, this changes. By nature, SOA enables an enterprise to compose business services, business events, rules and policies into business processes and interactions that actually match the intent of the business strategists and process owners. To understand, and instantiate, that business intent, leading organizations are evolving their enterprise architecture practices to include business architecture. In this talk, we will discuss the ties between SOA, EDA, BPM and business architecture, and the implications for enterprise architecture organizations and practitioners.

Key Issues
• Business-driven approaches to EA strategy and implementation
• Achieving business agility by blending SOA, EDA and BPM concepts in your EA
• The foundational role of business architecture is creating agility
• Why enterprise architects and organizations must gain ‘business-smarts'

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM

JetBlue: Improving the Customer Experience with SOA

Steve Shaffer, Director of Technology, Architecture, and Integration, JetBlue

Like many of its competitors in the airline industry, JetBlue possesses a broad range of systems accumulated over a period of years which have provided an inconsistent customer experience. Several years ago the team at JetBlue identified use of a more service oriented approach as one way that could reduce these inconsistencies.

To make their service oriented vision a reality, the team has focused on three areas; data consistency, reducing deployment time and improved operational efficiencies. The same data is often consumed by multiple services and needs active management to achieve consistency. Rapid deployment of services is frequently mentioned as a benefit of service orientation, but requires some organizational changes to actually achieve. And finally, while operational efficiencies were accrued from increased use of composite applications, the flexible nature of these applications brought changes to the way IT engaged with business partners. This session covers how these objectives were achieved and a brief look at their future direction.

Key Issues
• Understand the importance of data consistency
• The organizational changes needed to support rapid service deployment
• The impact of flexible composite applications on business partners

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 2:15 - 3:30 PM

Synchronizing EA & SOA Maturity

Lyn Robison, APS Analyst, Burton Group

Enterprise architects can make EA and SOA grow together symbiotically. However, before these efforts can cross-pollinate, they must both reach sufficient levels of maturity. An immature EA program will not provide the governance and architectural alignment that enterprise-wide SOA requires, and an immature SOA program will not take advantage of the architectural alignment that an EA program offers. Maturity models can offer prescriptive guidance for reaching higher levels of maturity. However, EA and SOA work at differing levels of abstraction, so it is impractical to apply a single maturity model to both EA and SOA. This session discusses maturity models for EA and for SOA, and also suggests heuristics for diagnosing specific areas of immaturity in enterprise IT. It further describes how particular IT initiatives can remedy those areas that lack the maturity to achieve EA and SOA cross-pollination.

Key Issues
• Achieving cross-pollination of EA and SOA efforts
• Diagnosing your EA and SOA efforts using maturity models
• Prescriptive guidance from maturity models and heuristics
• Applying enterprise-wide IT initiatives as remedies
• Organizing your efforts using EA frameworks

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 3:45 - 5:00 PM

SOA End-User Panel: Beyond the Books

Moderator: John Daly, VP & General Manager, Global Architecture Services, Keane, Inc.

Panelists: TBA

IT leadership understands, from an abstract perspective, the academic definition of SOA. However, the common issue is translating an academic definition to a practical application. This panel discussion will help with the translation by presenting lessons learned from real-world implementations of SOA. Learn how different companies have approached implementing SOA. Some are using strategic approaches while others used a more organic approach. Learn in an open dialog setting featuring some of the most progressive leaders in the field from various industries.

Please join us for a lively discussion of what works and what doesn't when you want to bring a SOA to your organization.

Key Issues
• How to focus on the business and use technology as an enabler
• How different organizations have approached implementing SOA
• How organizational boundaries effect leveraging SOA across the enterprise
• How designing for the user experience can effect implementation
• How to deal with your hardware & software vendors in new ways
• How standards are needed but not to be a hostage to them

Thursday, October 25, 2007 | 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM

Huntington Bank Case Study: "What Happens When this Thing Takes Off?" a Six Year SOA Success Story

Timothy Bender, Principal Enterprise Architect, Huntington Bancshares Incorporated

Are you working on SOA at your company? What challenges will you face after the concept is adopted, the project is executed and your business starts to depend on this new system? Huntington implemented their original SOA system in 2001. Today it has grown into a critical system for doing business. It delivers more than a million service transactions per day across multiple customer service delivery channels. This presentation will explore the architecture of the system; its business value propositions for Huntington and its customers; and some of Huntington's lessons learned. These lessons have been drawn from Enterprise Architecture's ongoing engagement with the SOA implementation, along with a recent roadmap review effort designed to assess and re-chart Huntington's SOA journey, now six years after initial implementation.

Key Issues
• Enterprise Architecture concerns over 6-year+ journey
• Operation: availability and scalability over time
• Efficiency: making services easy to create and consume
• Maintaining sponsorship
• The symbiotic relationship between data and servicesThursday, October 25, 2007 | 1:30 - 2:45 PM

Beyond SOA: Accelerating Innovation with Reusable Knowledge

Amit Mitra, Practice Manager of Enterprise Architecture, TCS GCP

This presentation will describe the next steps beyond SOA - the reusable knowledge that resides in the nexus between business process management, service oriented architecture and business intelligence. It will discuss a computing paradigm in which computers will manipulate meanings, not program code or blind symbols. Business processes and supporting information systems configured from reusable knowledge will be extremely flexible, configurable and coordinated, and the information systems that flow from them will flex in step with new learning. Computers built on these principles will operate on the plane of meanings - a little like we do.

Key Issues
• The concept and principles of knowledge reuse
• Semantics of knowledge (Metamodel)
• Reusable components of business knowledge
• Examples of automated knowledge reuse
• How it will impact the semantic web and support automation of innovation