Jaywalk

The 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2010, took place in Lima, Peru on August 12–15, 2010. This year marked the first time the conference has been held in South-America. The theme of the conference, “Sustainable IT Collaboration Around the Globe”, also expressed the international nature of this year’s forum. In fact, over half of all authors of papers presented at the conference were from outside the Americas region. Over 800 participants of 43 different nationalities were represented.
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Today, the 7th half-yearly mini seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) took place in Innopoli II, Espoo, Finland. Featuring only two presentations this time, the event allowed plenty of time for both presentations and discussion. The first presentation was given by Kari Hiekkanen, Aalto University, providing an introduction to SOA Governance. I gave the second presentation, approaching the topic of the day from Enterprise Governance perspective.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the Open Group Conference in Rome, Italy, and attending to the other sessions of the day. My presentation was entitled “Integrated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Governance” and showed many of the ideas I have been blogging about lately. I wrote a short summary of the presentation and also published the slides on Slideshare.

The 5th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance (ECMLG 2009) took place in Athens, Greece, yesterday and today, on November 5-6. It was a small but great conference featuring some really inspiring and thought-provoking sessions, particularly on Leadership side. Reflecting our time of change, many of the presentations recognized the need for more authentic, more collaborative and more ethical leadership.

I had the great honor and pleasure to present a paper entitled “EA and IT Governance — a Systemic Approach”, in which my colleagues and I put forth a governance construct called Agile Governance Model (AGM). It specifies an abstract meta-level governance structure that can be instantiated for any type of governance, e.g. IT governance, data governance, security governance. In this paper, we called for a distinct definition of EA governance that addresses the strategic, forward-looking aspects of enterprise architecture, currently downplayed by IT governance, and used AGM to position the notions of IT Governance and EA Governance with respect to the IT-related decision-making in the organization.

Today, I was lecturing at the Special Course in Information Systems Integration at Helsinki University of Technology for the fourth season already. This year, the theme of the course is Master Data Management (MDM) and I gave a lecture on MDM and Data Governance.

Today, the 1st International Symposium on Service-Oriented Locally adapted Enterprise Architecture, SOLEA 2009, took place in Dipoli conference center in Espoo, Finland. Having been planning and organizing the event for the last three months, it was great to see more than 60 people from 7 countries to attend the event.

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Today, the fall seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) took again place in Innopoli II, Espoo, Finland. The topic of the day was EA and SOA, which attracted around 30 people.

After my welcoming words as the SOA SIG chairman, Kari Hiekkanen, senior researcher, HUT, provided a brief introduction to SOLEA (Service-Oriented Locally adapted Enterprise Architecture), a new research project on EA and SOA. As an exemplary research topic, Kaisa Rommel then presented her master’s thesis work on SOA roadmaps.

I also put my HUT researcher hat on and gave a presentation entitled “Enterprise Architecture Enabling Organizational Change”, introducing some work-in-progress models that we have been developing in SOLEA recently: Service-Oriented EA Framework, SOA Maturity Model and Agile Governance Model. The response was encouraging.

Jouni Lähteenmäki, Enterprise Architect, OP Bank Group, presented OP-Pohjola’s approach to Enterprise Architecture and recounted the organization’s travel experiences in its EA/SOA journey in the last few years.

Last but certainly not least, Jaakko Riihinen of Nokia Siemens Networks gave a very insightful and interesting presentation on how Enterprise Architecture relates to Systems Engineering and how EA and SE capabilities should be created. No-one minded that Jaakko went a bit overtime with his extra slides exemplifying some of the topics that arose.

Today, I was lecturing at the Special Course in Information Systems Integration at Helsinki University of Technology again. I gave the following three lectures:

1. Business Process Integration
2. Business Process Management
3. Business Process Standards and Modeling

My seminar “Competitive Advantage through Agility: EA, BPM and SOA” was premiered on September 19 in co-operation with International Merito Forum. If you missed the show, the event will be reorganized in Helsinki, Finland, by Merito Forum on February 13, 2009 and will be given in English. You may also book a separate seminar day or individual presentation(s) conveniently at your own premises.

Please find the presentations of my seminar at my company web site.

Today, I gave a presentation on Holacracy and BPM Governance at the “Leadership, Ethics, Productivity” seminar in Laurea Leppävaara, Espoo, Finland.

More compelling, however, was Christopher Evatt’s account on how ethics and values bring about productivity in business. Very much in line with the sociocratic/holacratic principles, he argued for requisite alignment between people and organizations and the importance of co-operation for common goals. With some real life examples, he showcased how extraordinary outcomes can be achieved by setting values, rather than economics, in front.

On a side note, the same principles appear to be applicable at the personal level, too. Having a sound set of values begets the right results far better than an at-any-cost approach to achieve one’s goals. As the Dalai Lama puts it: “Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.”

In the third session of the morning, Anssi Balk gave an introduction to Integral Business embracing a diversity of insights, theories, and practices and connecting each in a manner that strengthens, rather than diminishes, the others. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the presentation and was also unable to attend the Open Seminar in the afternoon.