Yesterday I participated in IBM Softwareday 2006. The theme was "What makes you special?". The background of the theme was that many executives focus more and more on innovation and that innovation gives the real business benefits. After the opening by IBMs Sales Executive there was an inspiring speech by Mads Oevring, who told about the relevance of innovation and innovation in Novo. The Novo case was primary focused on importance of that their employees learn new things before their competitors in the medical industry and that more than 60% of knowledge comes from outside their organization.

After the initial speaking there were six trails, you could follow the rest of the day and I followed the SOA-trail, which was the most popular. The relation between innovation and SOA is of course that innovation requires readiness for change and SOA can make it easy to make changes.

The SOA-trail was introduced by a manager from IBM with focus on Entry points for SOA: How the organizations can start on SOA. The other speaks were among others from Danske Bank and The Danish Medicine Agency (Laegemiddelstyrelsen).

The IBM-manager presented their SOA Reference Architecture, which is much business oriented. The reference architecture was mapped with five categories of entry points, which were:

- People: Interaction Services that enables collaboration between people, process and information
- Process: Process Services that orchestrate and automate business processes
- Information: Information Services that manages diverse data and content in a unified manner
- Connectivity: Facilitates communication between services with ESB
- Reuse: Partner Services that connect with trading partners.

There was also focus on SOA-governance and the challenges. The rest of the speech was about IBM´s services and products.

The CIO from Danske Bank connected their "One Bank - One System"-vision with SOA and one platform for integrating processes and it. This one platform and the whole setup is a condition for their expansion and taking over new banks (fast integration of new banks national and international) - When you buy up a bank, you have to offer them something and one the main offers are Danske Banks architecture and infrastructure. The background of all this is of course efficiency by reuse in the long term, which gives Danske Bank differentiation and opportunities of innovation. This SOA-consolidation strategy results in better and better ROI when taking over new banks. Half of all their functionality is serviceenabled and whole their Netbanking-system is based on services.

The SOA-approach of Danish Medical Agency was rather technical and Bottomup-focused. Their SOA-approach was titled "From spaghetti to Lasagna" (and not SOA-sauce because of lack of Governance and other large challenges in SOA...). Their background for SOA was large non-documented solutions, redundancy in data and functionality, different systems for security, need for integrating silooriented systems and non-standard technology and tools. The first initiative was implementation of a new integrationplatform and a pilotproject. The triggers of the integration platform was need of standards, easy integration, documentation, reuse, less dependence of key persons and more competition between the vendors. The pilot project was a Price-Extranet-solution, where the medical firms now can report their prices online, which was done manual and by faxes before.

The slides from the SOA-trail can be downloaded here.