CETI Industry Day June 7th 2007

Research Themes For Complex Business-IT Systems.

The Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) is a multi-institutional Industry University Collaborative Research Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology also funded by the National Science Foundation’s IUCRC program. This network of Georgia Tech and OSU researchers provides the complementary mix of technology and enterprise architecture research needed for successful IT solutions.

OSU's CETI – CERCS for Enterprise Transformation and Innovation – recently hosted an Industry-University Collaborative Research Planning Day. The objective was to identify research themes that could be jointly pursued with industry dollars, leveraged and matched by the Nation Science Foundation’s program to promote industry-relevant research.

The agenda for the day included two industry panels and four research themes. Panels were as follows:

1. ‘Knowledge for Enterprise Agility’ – Sasi Pillay, CIO, NASA Glenn Research Center; John Schaffer, VP, Governance & Planning, Global Technology Solutions, McGraw-Hill Education

2. ‘Managing Change in the Face of Legacy’ Kim Liston, CIO, ODJFS; Mahesh Dalvi, Director, Director, IT, Enterprise Architecture & Quality Assurance, Qwest Communications; Mike Alvarez, Application Architecture & Strategy Manager, BMW Financial Services, Michael Elisco, Sr. Architect, Mainframe Center of Excellence, Nationwide Inc., Brian Mikesell, Sr. Architect for the Integration Center of Excellence.

The research themes and potential applications presented were as follows:

1. ACE Architecture: Model, Deploy, Monitor, Adapt. Applications: Business-IT alignment and prioritization, Innovation,Application of Lean concepts
   

2. Systems Research at CERCS: Virtualization, Autonomic computing. Applications: End-to-end Monitoring, Federated CMDB

3. Integrated Development Environments for Life-cycle Co-Engineering. Applications: Integration with management, deployment and simulation.

4. Kollaboratory Infrastructures for Knowledge Management. Applications: Enabling communities of practice with integration of heterogeneous content. Delivering just-in-time knowledge to help desks. Enabling integration of enterprise architecture practices into the system and software life-cycle.

Each research theme had ten to fifteen participants interested or very interested in further interaction. Follow-on actions are planned as follows:

• Special white papers to refine the areas of research
• Follow-on meetings with interested parties
• Formulation of deliverables and identification of research funds.