Last week I presented at two events representing the Consortium. Unfortunately both of them (TechTarget's CIO Decisions conference and Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit) were literally on the same days. Unfortunately, they were not literally in the same city. Or even the same state.
Thank you American Airlines for being on-time! The solution was to cover the TechTarget CIO conference in Carlsbad very quickly and then run off to Nashville for the Gartner conference, which I did. I hope to not have to do that again, as the CIO event was excellent-200 CIO's, by invitation only, and the quality was superb. The keynoter, André Mendes (CIO of the Special Olympics) delivered a stirring call to arms to CIO's to be leaders, innovaters and transformers in their organizations. Delivering that message to the SOA Consortium community, including CIO's, business analysts & enterprise architects, is important and I'm talking about that with him. My presentation (Making the SOA Leap) gave an overview of what we are doing and some early results. There was definitely interest in participation from the CIO's on-site, and we are following up.
Even more exciting, however, was the Gartner event in Nashville. While I was in Carlsbad, John Turato (CTO of Avis Budget Group) gave a keynote representing the SOA Consortium. I'm hoping to hear that soon as obviously I couldn't hear it on that day.
Of the 800 or so attendees at the conference, about 230-250 came to the SOA Consortium session on Wednesday in which Yefim Natis (Gartner Vice President & Distinguished Analyst) and I co-chaired a panel of SOA Consortium participants. These included Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of the American Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deutsche Bank) and our own Ground-Floor SOA leader, Surekha Durvasula (Kohl's Department Stores). Though I came prepared with questions, the audience began participating even before our panelists had a chance to finish giving two-minute position statements! We're working with Gartner to get audios of the panel (and John Turato's talk) available from the SOA Consortium web site and here on this blog). Watch this space for more information.
There's no question that Service Oriented Architecture was the hottest topic at the Gartner event, and there was plenty of buzz after the panel about it being one of the most useful events at the conference. At the end of the panel I summed up the discussion with the five themes that I felt came out of the discussion:
- Modeling Counts. Of course, as Chairman of the Object Management Group also, that wasn't a surprise to me! In fact OMG is working on SOA modeling standards. The interesting by-product of modeling SOA systems, however, was pointed out by an audience member: that modeling provides a "common ground" for business & IT to agree and work together.
- Business Agility is the Strategic Driver. This isn't a surprise to any follower of the Consortium! But it certainly was good to hear it, many times. SOAP and WSDL and UDDI aren't the issue: strategic development and integration are. All the panelists and several audience members made it clear that which technology is used for integration is a distant second to focusing development on integration.
- Most Shops are Already Doing SOA. This came out of a short discussion of what SOA is and isn't; there was very general agreement that it isn't a new idea, and even late-adopters are probably already "doing SOA."
- Measure, Measure, Measure. If the point is being able to easily integrate and re-orchestrate existing processes, then the quality and performance of those processes are important! Metrics are critical for business process that are going to be heavily leveraged.
- Sharing Experience is Critical. Well that doesn't surprise any of us either; that's the point of the SOA Consortium, to share our experiences.
Discussions on other topics - standards, SOA hype, and the complementarity of BPM and SOA - fit very well with the results from our Executive Summits and the roadmaps of where the Consortium is headed. This was some great visibility for the SOA Consortium (and it appears it will be a source of several new members as well!).
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