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Closing Remarks, Day 1 and Day 2, SOA CoP Co-chairs:

Brand Niemann: Some highlights in bullet form:

• Day 1:
  • Dennis Wisnosky: The best SOA (even Semantic SOA) in the Federal Government (according to the OMB FEA, etc.)
  • Mike Lang (and the Mike Lang Family CoP with Brooke and Mike, Jr.): Plan B became Plan A! (See his slides for explanation). He is the "real deal".
  • Panel (Dennis Sawyer): We are not yet at the tipping point and will need more of these kinds of CoP meetings to get there.
  • Lunch (not for direct attribution): Excellent presentations and agenda!
  • AJ Budhraja: Outstanding government leadership of SOA at Department of Labor
  • Andrew Ide: Bringing SOA to the largest E-Travel System
  • Larry Pizette: All those new MITRE White Papers (e.g. 7 greatest SOA challenges for Federal leaders) would be great to discuss at the 6th Conference.
  • Tom Dwyer: E-Gov is a myth! - Oops that's the title of this conference :) Thanks for quoting EPA's SOA Implementation work :), but more importantly showing the value of a CoP by looking at the other's slides and integrating you work with theirs (e.g. the two tutorials). Dave Carter, Rick Geneva, Tom Dwyer, and myself are going to collaborate on bringing BPM for SOA to transform the E-Rulemaking E-Gov Initiative at the upcoming Brainstorm Conference (a 5-in-1 mashup) June 24-27th.
  • Geof Raines: David Linthicum (previous conference) and Jeffrey Poulin have equations for the ROI of SOA (also see upload to the conference files at the bottom of the agenda page).
• Day 2:
  • Dave Carter: The Discipline required to make BPM and SOA Work (Tom Dwyer)! Agenda: Introduction, ABPMP, CBOK, Curricular, Certification, Change Process, and Q/A. A person of great integrity in his career. Lots of knowledge and experience reflected in this tutorial.
  • Shawn Mccarthy: See Quotes for the Gov SOA Front Lines (EA provides a context to implement SOA or PBM, Empowering users with Web 2.0 technologies forces you to ask the right questions, and Develop SOA on your own dime, but I will pay you to use it). Top Seven Preddictions: As SOA evolves IT governance will emerge out of necessity. Conclusion: Government computing cloud will continue to grow.
  • Issac Christofferson: Service Oriented Infrastructure - Moving from a dedicated infrastructure to a dynamic infrastructure. See recent papers posted to SOA Demo Phase 5.
  • Next Generation SOA Governance Panel: Adam Vincent replaces Jim Rice (see slides just posted). Follow Gartner recommendation with validation and testing of standards-compliance when assembled but before deployed. Virtualization of Web Services is like simulation (a higher order function).
  • Mashups, Web 2.0 and SOA Panel: Re-mixability=Mashups. Driver is economics (see the Long Tail book). IBM has a new Mashup Portfolio in a Mashup Center. Use content for this for Harvard Seminar Project: CIO's Learning Web 2.0 Wikis. Web 2.0 challenges within the government for Gov 2.0 (a few constraints like security, permissions, etc.). Brand mentioned a very helpful resource for communicating this toCIO's, buisness people, etc. from Frank Stein, IBM:
    • The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0, Sandy Carter, Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM: How to leverage SOA, Web 2.0, and related technologies to drive new levels of operational excellence and business innovation. Web 2.0 facilitates the collaboration aspects, and SOA enables the infrastructure for flexibility.
  • Bob Sadler: Waiting for additional funding to do more testing and integration of ESBs. The SOA CoP hopes that could include the Open Source ESB from IONA coming out of our 4th Conference. The SOA CoP needs the MITRE SOA Lab to host infrastructure for pilots and testing by the federal community of agencies, vendors, and consultants.
  • Leo Obrst: Led global community of ontologists earlier this week in their annual Ontology Summit for which the global community was most grateful where he mentioned the importance of CoIs and CoPs in getting agreement. Dennis Wisnosky's keynote mentioned Leo's helping DoD get started with semantic vocabularies. In essence Leo said we need to take Data to Information to Knowledge for semantic interoperability (see his Ontolgy Spectrum for Applications). And yes, Leo was still explaining ontologies to someone 30 minutes after the session formally ended! :)
  • Ken Laskey: Missed this one trying to cover the other three tracks at the same time, but Larry Pizette told me that he really appreciated the Blog and summary comments at the end of Day 1 and to keep it up! I will ask Larry to give me a synopsis for this presentation.
  • Cory Casanave: Change in Topic because Repository work not ready yet. Modeling standards for SOA are weak and that is what the OMG Architecture Group is addressing. Recall Dennis Wisnosky's keynote that mentioned this critical need as well.
  • Rex Brooks: If we gave a Special Recognition for the most beautiful slides (with excellent content of course), Rex would be the one to receive that (what else from someone who was trained in graphic design and is president of a design company) who volunteers his "spare time" to work on multiple OASIS Standards Groups and to lead the Integrated Response Services Consortium (IRSC). Each iteration of this pilot has taken it to a new level thanks to Rex's perserverance and the support of his team.
  • Rick Geneva: BPM for SOA by a Business Process Expert step-by-step. Create a web service, implemented with BPEL, with zero coding. Call a web service with zero coding. Route a web service call to a person, with zero coding. Their business is taking off and this is why and Rick is authoring a new book!
  • Steve Olding: Please change the IAC SOA Committee to IAC Mashup Committee.
  • Brand Niemann: Great thanks to all (especially the conference management team of Gabe, Greg, and Fran) who contributed to the success of this 5th conference (in the 50th year of MITRE!) and please send us your feedback (like immediately after the 4th conference that launced us into this conference) to be posted (unless you request otherwise), mark your calendars for October 1-2nd, and look for an email from us. Please have a safe trip home and enjoy networking if you would like until 5 p.m.
  • Greg Lomow: Another great day of presentations and panels (recall that he thought day 1 was the best in the history of the SOA CoPs conferences!) . What particularly impresses me is how the community's view of SOA has evolved and matured since the first conference, and how the community has embraced an extended perspective of SOA including BPM, Web 2.0, Enterprise Architecture, Business Architecture, Modeling Standards, Next Generation SOA, etc. I feel this bodes well for the ongoing adoption of SOA, its application to solving real world business and mission challenges, and for participation in future conferences. Thank you to everyone that made this conference such a resounding success.
  • A Special Thanks:
    • Ming Wang
    • Regina Oliver
    • Iris Gracia - Radcliffe
    • Michael Webb
    • Ron Walker
    • Keith Harmon
    • Ana Maria Galdo
    • Carla McKinney
  • Postscript: Greg had to leave early to catch his plane, so Brand stayed as long as people wanted to talk about how much they enjoyed the conference, how nice they thought the Certificates of Appreciation were, what to do for the next one, how to get even more people to attend, how to setup their own Web 2.0 Wiki, could IBM provide the book I mentioned (see above): The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0, etc.
  • Comments:
    • Thanks for hosting a great conference. As always, I enjoyed myself and got some good networking accomplished.
    • Just wanted to say it was nice meeting you and thanks for the Certificate of Appreciation!
    • I found the conference to be useful and understandable, despite my "light" knowledge of SOA. Thank you again for the courtesy of connecting the community.
    • Also very interesting. Love the way the look and feel has evolved over the last year. Also checked out all the links, such as to the DODAF and EPA areas.
    • It was a great conference and I wanted to reach out and convey my appreciation to you for your calm and consistent management during the two days earlier this month.  I'm glad I was a part of the team who put this on and it was, as always, a pleasure working with you on this.
    • This is the best SOA Conference in the country. I told my colleague to attend it next time.
    • I participated in an earlier conference and have done a lot now with ontologies for SOA and would like to present that at the next conference (We will certainly invite you back to do that!)
  • See Demo Phase 6