Service-Oriented Architecture

As I looked at the program schedule and started marking the topics to attend, it became evident that I was still loomed with yesterday's discussion.  My inquisitiveness - to find answers for those questions had made we choose the above mentioned topics.  Interestingly most of these topics were presented by researchers from IBM.  Most of the discussion was around the capabilities of execution centers, managing resources, an important conclusion that I could draw was that - It is necessary to model work allocations based on execution centers rather than on task and resources.  The resources should however be considered as the capability of execution center.  Further from other session researchers explained the importance change management, knowledge, service modeling and variation based approaches for Service Engineering.  There were few approaches proposed for which I would need more detailed reading.

After the initial excitement about Service Engineering, post lunch it was time for the topic which I have been looking for - Architecture for service based computing.  This tutorial proposed an 'Enterprise Service Architecture' (ESA) and gave the background and stressed on the fact of why this was necessary.  This explored the use of competence theory for answering few important questions that researchers perceived very essential. However, most interesting part of the tutorial was when the authors reviewed various frameworks that could be the basis of ESA.  Few of these frameworks that I remember were Porter's Value chain model, Business motivation model, Strategy maps, i*, and few more.  The tutorial was concluded by highlighting few gaps and setting few more motivations.  This being my area of interest, I feel there is lot research that needs to be put in both from formalizing it and finding ways to apply to real life situations.

The day ended with a simple and quite banquet, a regular tradition at any conference....