Business Ecology: Optimization for Innovation
Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

In this talk, Brenda Michelson will provide an overview of Business Ecology, the OMG's Business Ecology Initiative and the relationship to the practice area communities, including the BPM/SOA Consortium.

The Power of Convergence: Why Bringing Business and Technology Together Matters
Unifying the management of business and technology will sooner or later involve everyone in an organization, from the chairman of the board to the newest hire on a project team. Convergence requires not only new roles and responsibilities but also a new mindset and new skills. In converged companies, business-unit and technology leaders operate almost interchangeably: every manager is accountable for some business-related aspect of technology. One sign of a converged company is that the people making decisions have mastered the skills needed to articulate their business objectives and use the appropriate technology required to achieve those objectives.

Faisal will illustrate the hallmarks of a converged organization according to the Business Technology Management Framework and define a set of organizational competencies that enable an enterprise to manage business and technology together, as well as outline how maturity in these capabilities is achieved through the implementation of well-defined processes, appropriate organizational structures, timely information and appropriate technology automation.

Decoding Business/IT Unity
A lot has been written and said on the topic of Business/IT Alignment.  A lot of methods have been tried, and yet the goal has never seemed as elusive as it does in today's business climate.
Business comes to the table with the increased pressures of the business cycle, the ever increasing information velocity, and the ever-more demanding client. IT comes to the table with solutions that seem to only increase in complexity bolstered by ever expanding technology disciplines, vendors, and standards, not to mention the baggage of years of suboptimal decisions coming home to roost. Business comes to the table from the top down. IT from the bottom up.
They each speak a myriad of different 'Englishes'. They generally have an issue agreeing on how to define terms of engagement, or even who should own those terms, something we commonly see bubble up to the surface as data governance challenges. The mismatch between the
business operating models of IT and their business stakeholders (or BOMM for short) can provide clues as to why the relationship between business and IT sometimes comes to resemble a cold war. This presentation will examine Business IT Alignment Patterns (and anti-Patterns) from the perspective of Business P&L Owners at various sizes of organization.

The Business Ecology Framework

During 2009, the SOA Consortium's EA2010 Working Group - a group of "street-smart" enterprise architecture practitioners - discussed the domains, services, practices and skills required for a thriving, business relevant enterprise architecture practice in the 2010s.

A critical finding of these discussions is the emphasis of technology concerns at the expense of business understanding, and ultimately, true business enablement, in most enterprise architecture practices today. Successful enterprise architecture practices in the 2010s must give equal emphasis to technology and business concerns. The means for this re-balancing is the elevation, and in some cases initial adoption, of business architecture practices.

In this talk, members of the EA2010 team will present key ideas from their Business Architecture paper for group discussion.

The paper is available here: http://www.soa-consortium.org/EA2010.htm

The Role of Business and Technology Architectures Within the Concept of Business Ecology
What is the relationship between business and Technology architectures? Should Technology Architecture be considered only as a resource to enable more efficient execution of business processes? Can technology transform a business by bringing in new alternatives that have never been seen before? Is there an infinite loop between constantly changing business needs and technologies that have to support them? How does business change influences Business Architecture? What are the mechanisms to keep Business and Technology architectures aligned?

A Proven Collaborative Governance Model for Business and IT
Business and IT have increasingly grown apart over the past decades and this has resulted in a misalignment of strategic and tactical goals and a communication breakdown between these two distinct, yet highly intertwined worlds. Business and IT largely communicate through a complex web of intermediaries that includes business analysts, IT analysts, IT architects, designers and a labyrinth of management tiers. Collaboration has been replaced by more and more costly efforts to create new techniques, technologies, communication languages and a variety of panaceas.

This session will provide a collaborative governance model to address the business / IT alignment and communication gap. We will also review a case study from a telecommunications company where the business / IT communication gap was closed and collaborative governance became a solution in practice - not just in name.

Achieving Synergy Between BPM, SOA and EA
In this talk Alexander will share his experience with an architectural framework, which combines several modern methodologies and technologies [Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)] for the improvement of enterprise business performance. He will present the description of the architectural framework and examples of business cases.

Business Ecology: Leveraging the Innovation Curve to Achieve Balance and Alignment in the Ever-changing Environment
To stay competitive, organizations have to have a high level of agility to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently to complex environment challenges such as customer demands, competition, markets, compliance requirements and economic conditions, to name a few. Is there a "method to the madness"? Can we ever achieve the level of flexibility, balance and technology alignment to effectively support the enterprise? This presentation will examine the concepts of Business Ecology, Innovation Curve and Measurement Framework that will help better understand, monitor and measure critical processes, analyze challenges and proactively take action.

A critical success factor for Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and Business Ecology is collaboration between business and information technology professionals. The basis for collaboration is a common understanding and shared goals.

In this roundtable, we will discuss techniques to raise the business IQ of information technology professionals.