Andrew S. Townley, Founder and Managing Director of Archistry Limited, announced today that he will be presenting at this year's OASIS Symposium to be held on April 15-20th in San Diego, California. Mr. Townley's presentation, "Interactive SOA: Towards Content-Centric Services", will be part of the symposium's "The Challenges Ahead" session targeted towards business users with techical knowledge.
Mr. Townley's presentation looks at some fundamental problems in the way technology has been applied in delivering e-business solutions and proposes some solutions to addressing these issues in the future. "If you look at the way technology has been applied to business over the last 40 years, it was foused on reduction of costs and boosting productivity, which was directly tied to the mind-set of a manufacturing economy. The problem we're facing today is that the nature of how business is done is changing. What used to matter was product, but now consumers place more value on the services they receive. The product is a commodity in many cases," said Mr. Townley. "This shift is causing businesses to focus more on achieving sustainable business advantages over their competitors; finding things that their competitors can't easily replicate. One of the biggest assets a company has is the people who make the decisions day-in and day-out. These people are where future productivity gains through applying technology needs to be focused. We don't have this today—we're still focused on process automation, integration and outsourcing, not enabling the decision makers in an organization."
Mr. Townley cites research from McKinsey & Company from 1997 and 2005 that classifies workers into "transactional" and "tacit" categories, based on the type of work they do. Transactional workers are individuals who do repetative tasks that could easily be automated or outsourced, while tacit workers are individuals who have extensive knowledge and experience and who are expected to engage in complex activities and make critical business decisions. Mr. Townley believes the ability to deliver solutions to enable tacit workers using current approaches is limited due to a focus on application programming interfaces (APIs) being "baked into the developer psyche for the last 40 years" rather than leveraging content-centric hypermedia applications like the World Wide Web that are focused on delivering information. "Hypermedia applications have been around for a long time, but until the Web, they didn't see widespread exposure outside specific industries. If we can figure out how to leverage those concepts within Service-Oriented Architectures and deliver information services designed to meet the open-ended needs of the knowledge worker, we'll be able to build much more flexible systems and solutions. Helping these people make more informed decisions more quickly will enable businesses to deliver better services and therefore more value to the consumer. It will also allow organizations to increase their profitability by establishing appropriate pricing models around these services people will feel are reasonable."
The annual OASIS Symposium is a week long event which includes tutorials, exhibits, poster presentations, and informative workshops. In addition (and back by popular demand), the event will once again feature OASIS Technical Committee Lightning Rounds, a fast and fun way to track related work and make valuable connections.
The program will feature keynote addresses, two tracks with sessions geared for both high-level and technical attendees, and several interactive panel discussions. All presentations will be geared to provide an assessment and preview of what emerging technologies and standards are likely to shape the future of eBusiness and eGovernment, as well new trends in developing publishing software.
More information about the OASIS Symposium may be found on the Web at http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium/2007/
Archistry Limited is a professional services firm based in Dublin, Ireland that focuses on helping clients deliver improved business performance and productivity through effective utilization of technology. Archistry's service offerings include enterprise IT governance, SOA planning and implementation guidance, information assurance and optimization and improvement of IT implementations. More information about Archistry Limited is available on the Web at www.archistry.com.
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