October 3, Seminars and Round Table for CIOs

How to implement a Succesfull SOA

Workshop Leader: Mike Rosen, Director of the Enterprise Architecture Practice

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been around for a while. In fact, many of the most demanding, existing applications are constructed according to these principles. With the introduction of new technologies such as Web services and J2EE, we are seeing a recurrence of interest in SOAs, but most of the available information has focused on the technology aspect, which is only half the problem. This seminar goes beyond the basic technology to examine other vital aspects of an SOA; how to build applications that produce and consume services, how to combine services into meaningful, high-level enterprise services, how to enable the independent construction of services. Finally, the seminar will explain how to start introducing these techniques and technologies into your applications and organization.

After completion of the workshop, you will understand the basics of a SOA, and how it relates to technical, application, integration and enterprise architectures. You will have an understanding of how to implement an SOA infrastructure on the leading technologies, how to build services, and how to build enterprise applications by combining services together to create high-level business services.

Michael Rosen is Director of Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture practice and Senior Consultant with its Business-IT Strategies practice. He has more than 20 years' technical leadership experience architecting, designing, and developing software products and applications.

Mike is author of “Applied SOA”

Cost Reduction Roadmap for IT

Workshop Leader : Robert Benson,Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant

According to most reports, the economy is flat and the immediate future looks like more of the same.   At times like these, business and IT executives pay a lot of  attention to possible cost reductions.   And this applies to IT in particular.

Many IT journals regularly publish thoughts on how to approach IT cost reduction.  Ideas like renegotiating vendor contracts,  offshoring, and deferring upgrades are examples of their advice.   Companies also reduce costs by deferring systems development projects.   Unfortunately, most organizations have already done these things.  So what’s next?  How can substantial cost reductions be found in IT?

Two big opportunities.  Business and IT executives should carefully explore the IT projects capital and expense budget and the on-going IT expense budget for opportunities for cost reduction.  The Cost Reduction Roadmap addresses both project budgets and the on-going IT expense budget.

The first opportunity is the projects capital and expense budget.  We have found that most companies do not subject their IT project proposals to business-driven prioritization.  By conducting a regular prioritization (applying portfolio management principles) the company identifies low-value and no-value projects.  We apply time-tested portfolio management principles (see the references at the end of this note.)

The biggest opportunity is in ongoing IT operations.  The reality is that most IT expenses are in the “black box” of ongoing operations.    The challenge here is to have a suitable framework for looking at cost reduction opportunities.  Unfortunately the traditional IT costs centers do not help.  These costs centers (e.g., R/D, enterprise-architecture, data-center, operations, etc.) do not connect well to the services IT provides, and so a cost reduction exercise based on those cost centers is also disconnected from the services provided.  Organizations that attempt to characterize their service levels in “platinum”, “gold” etc. fashion have some connection between cost and services, but these efforts typically are limited to a small percentage of the total IT spend.

IT executives need a roadmap to cost reduction.   An effective framework for IT cost reduction can be developed by applying a simple roadmap to cost reduction.  This roadmap establishes the cost reduction framework:

Round Table for CIOs

New Rules" - how are changes in and around enterprises changing IT's role and how are CIOs responding?

Roundtable Leader : Lou Mazzucchelli, Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council and a Senior Consultant with Cutter´s Innovation & Enterprise Agility and Social Networking

October 1 || October 2 || Agenda