*Topics and speakers are updated regularly and subject to change at any time

Keynotes
Track One
Track Two

Keynotes

EA as the Foundation for the Collaborative, Innovative Enterprise
Presented by Paul Liesenberg, Enterprise Architecture and Technology Manager, Cisco

Web 2.0 and Unified Communications are gaining importance in the enterprise. Today’s users expect to interact in individual ways, affecting business processes and opening the door to exciting new opportunities. How does this impact your ability to interact, not just transact, with your customers? Close alignment of business goals and technology requires an enterprise architecture that enables faster development, deployment, and adoption of innovative application models. Paul Liesenberg will outline the importance of the network in today’s enterprise architecture. The network provides a ubiquitous platform that delivers intelligent, secure services for communication and collaboration, transforming the IT architecture into a strategic business asset and enabling easier integration into business applications that accelerate business productivity and enhance customer experiences.

Paul Liesenberg develops methodologies that optimally align next-generation infrastructures and overarching business processes. Prior to Cisco, Paul was VP of Strategic Marketing for ZettaCom and Bivio Networks. Earlier, he was with StrataCom and Cisco post-acquisition, Nortel's Data Networks Division, and Siemens' Public Networks' R&D division. He holds two patents in the area of VoIP, and an M.Sc. from TUM (Technische Universitaet Muenchen).

Technology Strategy in the Real World
Presented by Paul Preiss, President, IASA

In today's competitive marketplace, only the most efficient businesses survive. Selling, then delivering your products, and adapting to constantly changing technology landscape, while being agile enough to capitalize on new market opportunities and outpacing your competitors taxes even the most mature organizations.

Businesses are looking to maximize their effectiveness, and that takes coordination amongst an organization's many different parts. This is the goal of an Architecture; selecting an architecture is a strategic decision. An architecture takes stock of where the business is today and where it wants to go, and puts in place a framework that unifies an organization's units - its business, operations, technology and personnel - so that they function synergistically and moves in unison towards this goal.

 The Major Enterprise Architecture Methodologies:  A Comparison
Presented by Roger Sessions, Chief Technology Officer, ObjectWatch

If you are getting ready to develop and Enterprise Architecture, one of your first tasks is to choose a methodology. But this is harder than it sounds. There are at least six important methodologies including Zachman, TOGAF, and FEA. They differ in almost every respect, including goals, approach, and validation. Each has its group of proponents who believe that only their methodology offers meaningful solutions. And yet, these methodologies disagree not only on how to build an enterprise architecture, but what an enterprise architecture is.

So how do you choose between them? This talk goes over the basics of enterprise architectures with a focus on how where these methodologies agree (not very much!), where they disagree (quite a bit!) and how you might decide which (if any) are best for your organization.

Roger Sessions is a well known speaker and presenter in the field of high-end enterprise architectures. He is the author of seven books (including Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises), dozens of articles, and many white papers. He holds patents in software engineering and in the Simple Iterative Partitions methodology, a new approach to managing complexity in enterprise and IT architectures. Roger writes and publishes the ObjectWatch Newsletter, a widely read and highly regarded newsletter on high-end enterprise software technologies. He is on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Software Architects, the Editor in Chief of Perspectives of the International Association of Software Architects, and is recognized by Microsoft as an MVP.

It’s time!
Presented by Bob Hughes, Executive Vice President, Cogentes

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why do businesses do some of the things they do?  Have you ever thought that common sense has left the decision making process?  If you were to design a new organization from scratch, would you model after the companies you see around you today?  Would you do things the same way or would you do things differently?

In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek review of business, it may be time to question the time honored, best practices, standard procedures that many companies use on a daily basis.  As architects, you have a unique visibility into how an organization is functioning, and provide feedback that can help alter the thinking that goes on.  It’s time to step back and take a look at the possibilities of questioning the status quo or conventional wisdom and review a unique opportunity that architects have in an organization

Track One

Building an Architecture Team
Presented by Mitch Ruebush, Chief Architect, ING Direct

Abstract coming soon!

Beyond the Hypervisor: The Role of the Network in Virtualizing your Infrastructure
Presented by Chris Wiborg, Cisco

Virtualization is a journey that often begins with a focus on server consolidation as the first step on a path towards increased efficiency, agility and resilience. While this is a natural place to start, virtualization complexity increases significantly at scale. Not only can the network play a key role in furthering the objectives of your server virtualization initiative, it also allows you to virtualize infrastructure resources such as storage, I/O and the core services provided by the network itself. As a result, your data center architecture becomes increasingly responsive to the demands of the business. This session will describe a service-oriented network architecture that enables many of the application technologies currently capturing the attention of enterprise architects, including SOA and Web 2.0. Attendees will learn how the network can reduce complexity and management costs, enhance system resiliency and flexibility, and improve the usage and efficiency of networked assets and applications.

Data Access Patterns for Rich Internet Applications
Presented by Bill Wolff, Solutions Architect in the Microsoft Practice, Unisys Corporation

New Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way we think about web user experience. Most of these applications are data driven. The patterns to interact with this data are evolving and require careful consideration. This talk presents options popular in Microsoft development tools including SOAP, WCF, LINQ, RSS, ATOM, JSON, SYNC, and others. The Rich Internet experience is programmed in Silverlight using XAML and C#.

Architecting is Part of the Agile Process
Presented by Jon Kern

All too often, "Doin' Agile" gets translated to doing a crappy job, just coding, no design or architecture to speak of. Of course, don't go to the other extreme and architect so much you never get anything done. Learn how to blend the steps of architecting a solution into the agile process. This will be a rundown of simple concepts that provide the crucial ingredients to build a solid app on top of solid architecture in an agile way.

Social Computing Roundtable: Value and Risks of community technologies

Social computing technologies such as blog, wiki, chat and others are changing the way we live and do business. Some are happy with the change and see a brave new world of business and technology. Others see risk in both information veracity and organizational liability and security. In this roundtable we will discuss the latest in social computing and it's potential use and abuse in the enterprise. What should vendors be doing, how should corporations control or loose a social computing strategy?

The Architecture Factor: Architectural Governance in a Spin-Free Zone.
Presented by David Solivan, Architect Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

What is governance but the effort to see one’s designs and decisions implemented? Whether you are producing application frameworks, identifying coding best practices or selecting a SAN vendor, your work is compromised if no one uses it or adheres to its vision. Our industry continues to struggle with governance, but there is a field of endeavor that has been at it far longer than we. Just as technology architects owe a debt to the field of architecture that came before them, so too does architectural governance have much to learn from age old principles of political governance. We will explore this connection and find new ways to govern without oppressing the masses while using tools that empower the populous, rather than making more red tape.

Security and Identity Management 
Presented by  Computer Associates

Abstract and speaker information coming soon!

SOA Roundtable: The value and risks of an enterprise SOA strategy

SOA has been a buzzword for many years now. It has become a multi-billion dollar industry for vendors and corporations alike yet there is still significant argument over it's value to IT much less a business as a whole (just google SOA failure for some interesting comments). Architects and developers alike have both anecdotal and precise information on the value and risks of an SOA strategy. During this session we will catalogue some of this evidence and discuss priorities and further mechanisms for defining a valuable SOA.

Track Two

Taking a Business Centric Approach Towards Building your Enterprise Architecture.
Presented by Brian Mitchell, Chief Architect, CIGNA

“Let me tell you why it’s really different this time”.  This quote probably resonates with most seasoned architects when faced with skeptical business partners who have heard how the latest IT efforts around Enterprise Architecture (EA) and SOA will help them address their current business challenges.  At CIGNA Group Insurance (CGI) we are now into the third year of our journey in transforming SOA from an IT driven design style and architecture strategy to an initiative focused on delivering business capabilities, process improvement, data quality and reduced business pain.   In this case study we will examine how CGI evolved from a siloed application development shop to one focused on delivering a project portfolio rooted in a strong SOA foundation.  To achieve success we placed significant emphasis on the business architecture components of our EA, and formed very strong partnerships (and credibility) with the business by using architecture to strengthen their own business cases. 

Principles-based Architecture.
Presented by Ken Fulmer, CTO, Sunoco

Abstract ans speaker information coming soon!

The Role of Governance in a System Development Lifecycle.
Presented by Cliff Berg, IASA Capital Area Chapter President, Consultant and Author

Abstract coming soon!

So you want to be an Architect?
Presented by Bill Zack, IASA NY Chapter President, Architect Evangelist, Microsoft

This presentation will help Aspiring Architects chart their course to becoming an Architect. It will also help existing Architects identify the skills that they either lack or need to improve. It covers what a Software Architect needs to know to do their job. This includes an understanding of the responsibilities of the Architect as well as the Tools, Design Patterns and Frameworks that can be applied in specific situations.

UML Metamodeling for Enterprise Architecture
Presented by Terry Merriman, President, OAD Consulting

Modeling your enterprise architecture in a consistent, concise, and precise manner so that all stakeholders’ views are addressed can be a formidable task. Making that architectural model readily available and understandable to those who need it can be even more challenging. In this session, we will discuss a UML modeling framework that is based on a metamodel designed to help architects capture the architecture in a manner that is readily available to project teams and strategic planners alike.

Bootstrapping an Enterprise Organization
Presented by Bradley Rhine, CEO, Cogentes

As awareness of Enterprise Architecture builds within corporate leadership, many will face the challenge of assembling an EA organization for the first time and integrating it successfully into an existing corporate culture. In this session we explore how to get started, some of the essential activities, and pitfalls that await. Some of the topics we explore: The role of the EA organization within the corporate culture at large; primary activities that an EA organization should undertake; skills required in the early stages; establishing a role profile recognized by HR for architects within the company and overcoming the notion of architect as an “honorary” title - as is often prevalent.

RIA Roundtable: Getting it right
Chaired by TBD

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) based solutions are coming out of the woodwork. From platforms like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight to open source AJAX, technology is allowing us to create ever more interesting, usable and powerful solutions to internet accessible applications. These technologies can often come at the cost of complexity in one or more development environments and team solutions. This panel will focus on mechanisms and studies which support best practices and successful solutions to RIAs in practical business scenarios. Bring your best RIA architecture to share with the crowd.

Managing My Career
Chaired by Paul Preiss, President, IASA

A career as an architect is no easy thing. Figuring out which job to get first, the skills you need, a path to advancement, and how to navigate the delicate political landscape of corporate IT are all major hurdles. Even once you've reached the enterprise architect level it becomes all that much harder. How do you grow your influence beyond the corporation and ensure that your next job as an EA is better than the last. In this round table we will review career progress and opportunities never explored before.

OpenSpaces Roundtables
Chaired by Recommender

IASA has provided space to hold a number of open spaces round tables. Be sure to check the recommendation sheets and come prepared with your favorite (or most pressing) topic or concern! Just signup for an open spaces hour when registering!