Sandy Carter, vice president, SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing for IBM

Sandy Carter is responsible for driving IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA marketing initiatives. She is considered an expert in the SOA field and is author of The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0.

Innovation that matters to CEOs:

• Extend the ability to collaborate inside and outside
• New innovative business model and processes
• Leverage information for business optimization

Most CEOs are looking for change at a dramatic level. The change needs to be at the level of both business and IT in order to have a significant effect.

This is where service orientated architecture (SOA) comes in. SOA differs from other technologies in that it’s service-oriented: SOA implementation is as much about business as technology.

This need for change has lead to the development In the field of business analytics, there is a move from KPIs to KAIs - that’s Key Agility Indicators. IBM have developed a benchmarking tool to show KAIs for different industries. Forrester and Gartner are due to publish reports in this area.

Sandy then went on to list key characteristics that make companies agile:

Evolutionary

Change business scenarios on-the-fly using current systems as building blocks. Smart SOA is the key. Start with a single project. Keep it simple. Then extend in an end-to-end fashion.

IBM practices what it preaches and does implement SOA. From 2002 there has been a roadmap for SOA implementation, moving towards the ‘Factory in a box’ model. The key is agility, rather than cost-cutting. IBM concentrated on how quickly it could switch suppliers. This helped make the business more agile and allowed it more flexibility in negotiations with suppliers.

Business-led

Allow your customers to make their own changes. Many companies find this difficult, as it means giving up a degree of control. However, Web 2.0 is driving the transferal of power to the consumer. This is possible through the adoption of dynamic platforms and the building of web-based communities. Sandy gives the example of her custom mashup dashboards she uses to track her business within IBM.

The provision of business policies is also important. Policies should be incorporated with business rules. Policies are in business language - not logical IT language or limited to strict procedural flow. These policies, once defined, are translated into business rules.

Collaborative

Continuous collaboration of business and IT delivers value, according to recent study by McKinsey/London School of Economics. Collaborative changes between IT and business far outweigh individual business process or IT process changes.

At the employee level, there is a new ‘collaborative’ skill-set appearing. This group have both strong business and IT skills. IBM has been at the forefront of training for these skills, which help individuals build the link between process and SOA. Gaming technology is used for teaching as simulators are more effective than a classroom teaching environment. IBM has developed online simulations that have been adopted by more than 2000 universities.

Closing note: make sure you understand what influences change in your business area and act accordingly.

Jon Ferraiolo will present “The Power of Mashup Technology—Helping the Enterprise Meet the Promise of Web 2.0 and SOA” at DIALOG 08 on Monday Feb 25th, 11.30 am - 12.00 pm.

Web 2.0, Mashups, SOA: Probably the top three buzzwords around at the moment in enterprise IT. All credit to Jon Ferraiolo, then, for managing to squeeze all three of them into the title of his DIALOG 08 keynote presentation (just edging out fellow IBM colleague Sandy Carter who managed only two out of three for her “New Language of Business” keynote earlier the same morning!)

But nobody can accuse Jon Ferraiolo of jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. In fact, Jon is probably about as far as you can get from being an upstart fly-by-night, here-today-gone-tomorrow hipster.

As director of operations for the OpenAjax Alliance (the primary standards and advocacy group for Ajax), Jon has been working feverishly within IBM’s Emerging Technologies group and The OpenAjax Alliance since 2006 to help establish key mashup standards that will allow the industry to achieve the full benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Before joining IBM, Jon worked for Adobe for 13 years as product manager, architect, and engineering manager on products that included Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop and was also principal architect for Adobe’s SVG product efforts.

In presenting mashups as a revolutionary new approach to application development, Jon will draw on his vast experience and knowledge of the field and provide a compelling argument as to why businesses must embrace Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 approaches if they hope to remain competitive.

Originally planned as part of the conference’s Visualization track, Jon’s session was deemed to have such broad appeal and relevance that it was promoted to a cross-track keynote - kind of appropriate for a presentation about mashups, I think :-).

I, for one, will be all ears.