Gartner's Application Development & Integration and Enterprise Architecture Summits

Regular readers of this blog will know that the SOA Consortium last year negotiated a strategic relationship with Gartner; the core of this agreement is the inclusion in two of Gartner's key Summit events of sessions which are focused on the SOA Consortium and its members.  This key outreach tactic of the Consortium will be extended this year to include other Gartner summits (as well as other events); keep an eye here for announcements and information.  Immediate opportunities to hear more from Gartner on SOA Consortium-relevant topics are coming up at their BPM event in Las Vegas, the next Application Architecture, Development & Integration event in Orlando and the Enterprise Architecture event in Orlando.

The purpose of this post, however, is to report on the two SOA Consortium Gartner Summit sessions held in early December last year, in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I'm delighted to report that once again, Gartner has graciously allowed the audio of these two excellent panels to be available publicly and you'll find the pointers here in the blog.

The first panel was at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit.  Entitled "Lessons Learned in Advanced SOA", this session was cochaired by Gartner Distinguished Analyst Yefim V. Natis and me, and included a sterling cast of architects that have been there and done that.  They included

• Jeff Adkins, Integration Architect, Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation
• Siamak Amjadi, Head of SOA Centre of Excellence, Nordea Bank
• Aleks Buterman, Chief Architect, Lincoln National Corporation
• Ayan Mitra, Senior Enterprise Architect, Orange Home UK

Like everyone else, I do love a great debate, but there was quite a bit of agreement among this very diverse group for the several hundred people in the audience.  All report some level of success implementing the SOA business agility strategy in their organizations, with common themes around managing stakeholder expectations, engaging executive management in the transition, building a base of shared services across business unit silos, and developing a stakeholder-driven governance structure to guarantee success.  Thanks to Gartner, you can hear the entire panel from this podcast.

The next day, I was again privileged to cochair a panel at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit, this time with Distinguished Analyst Nicholas Gall.  This time the subject was, not unexpectedly, "SOA and Enterprise Architecture".  Nick & I wondered: would the participants think of "SOA" and "Enterprise Architecture" as the same pursuit?  As related approaches to solving problems?  As competitive approaches?  Our panel included

• William Conroy, Global Enterprise Architecture Executive, Bank of America
• Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect, Monsanto
• Sam Vetto, Enterprise Architect, The Hartford

Again lively discussion was the order of the day, though I can't claim there was a battle on the dais for the several hundred audience members to follow!  It was clear that the panelists considered Enterprise Architecture part of the mix necessary to achieve the SOA business strategy, but many other themes flowed through the conversation, including how to work with the business and prove value; managing incentives for business units to come to the process improvement table; keeping an opportunistic eye out for cross-enterprise initiatives (this one reminded me of the Federal Enterprise Architecture!); leveraging not only technology but process optimization ideas like Lean and Six Sigma; and integrating both legacy systems and BPM technologies into the solution mix.  And once again, governance structures were a major topic of discussion.  You can hear the entire panel from this podcast.

This year we're expanding our relationship with Gartner (in fact, next week I'll be at Gartner's Business Process Summit in Las Vegas -- just can't stay away from the plastic city).  We're also expanding the Consortium's relationship with the likes of SHARE, TechTarget, SourceMedia, OMG, and the events of our own Founding Sponsors (including IBM IMPACT and SAP TechEd, with discounts for SOA Consortium members).

As I said, it's going to be an exciting year, and that's just on the event front; wait until you see what we have to say about analyst relationships, podcasts and webcasts (especially from the quarterly meetings), and the expanding Executive Summit program!  Now is a great time to get involved, either as a Participant or to join our soon to be expanding group of Sponsors!