It turns out they are going to move the schedule back to allow for the overrun in the keynotes so I have some time to catch up.

So, Steve Mills. Steve re-iterated the power of business and IT alignment, again quoting the LSE / McKinsey study that shows such alignment doubles productivity (I am looking for the study and will blog about it when I find it). This reminded me of Ade McCormack’s book and I would recommend it to you. Anyway, Steve talked about a service-oriented business and described such a business as a series of linked services - some of which should, no doubt, be decision services (wiki). He talked about legacy applications now serving business processes with “content” and it struck me that this assumes all the decision-making is being done by people, reinforcing to me at least that decision services must be mixed in with all this “content”.

IBM talks about People, Information, Process supported by Reuse and Connectivity and uses Smart SOA to wrap a progression from Fundamentals to End-to-End to Transformation to Dynamic Adaptability in a simplicity-centric business interface and built on a robust IT infrastructure. This, they say and I agree, is important as increasingly it is end-to-end processes that differentiate a business and this leads to process integrity concerns and innovation opportunities as processes stretch across the extended enterprise. After all, all IT spend has been about automating business and SOA is no different - nor, after all, is EDM.

Tom Rosamilia of IBM was next pointing out that before “it” can be “not about the technology” you have to be able to depend on the technology! He showed an SOA Reference Architecture allowing BPM to build on SOA and I will track this down (though it is not easy to find). He showed a classic Model and Simulate->Rapid deploy and change->Monitor Predict and Act and talked about Cognos’ role in this.

Interestingly, IBM seems to have a big focus on business events and business policies. Business Event Processing is about when to act and Business Policy is about what to do. Steve talked about a new product in this space with a template-based set of rules for event correlation (I shall try and review this soon).

Another customer spoke next but we were 30 minutes behind schedule so many of us (including me) left.