CETI Industry Day 2009 and EA Forum on Agile Practices

See below for a final update on the CETI Industry Day and CETI EA Forum on Agile Practices in the Enterprise, to be held at The Ohio State University on Thursday June 11th. The attendees, Industry Day program, and the Agile Panel program have been updated.

Note that we are past room capacity, so it is with regret that I say that the session is now closed to anyone who has not yet responded. If you decide not to attend, please do let me know!

The Industry Day, which begins at 8:30 am and ends with at 3 pm, will showcase thirty-five projects - research and practice collaborations between CETI and local industry. Location is E100, Scott Laboratories http://www.osu.edu/map/building.php?building=148. This link: takes you to a page with building and parking location and a link to Google Map directions.

So far the following (in alphabetical order by last name) have registered to attend. Please let me know if I have missed someone, or if your plans to attend have changed.

1. Lester Barnhart, OSU
2. Shain Bergman,
   
3. Ben Blanquera, Progressive Medical
   
4. John Bishop, IT Martini
   
5. Keith Byers, TDCI
6. JP Byrne, Nationwide Inc. (CETI Member)
   
7. Tom Bihari, Nationwide (CETI Member)
   
8. Jennifer Bleen, COHAA
9. David Bourke, Bostech
   
10. John Buk, Glomark-Governan
    
11. Scott Burdette, ICC
12. Mike Busch, Cardinal Solutions Group
    
13. Prasad Calyam, OSC
    
14. Paul Carlson, City of Columbus (CETI Member)
15. Moez Chaabouni, City of Columbus (CETI Member)
    
16. Mike Chizmar, Progressive Medical
17. Alan Cline, Carolla Inc.
18. Mark Collins, Emergitech
    
19. Mahesh Dalvi, Qwest
20. Dinesh Dalwaddi, Nationwide Inc.
    
21. Peter Dean, Gap Inc. (Panelist)
    
22. Greg Deckler, Bluechip LLC
23. David Declue, ODJFS
24. Gary DeGregorio, Thoughtworks
    
25. Dinesh Dhamija, TDCI (CETI Member)
26. Rattan D'Souza, Worthington Industries
    
27. Sanjay Dudaney, Halcyon Solutions
    
28. Dan Eckstein, Worthington Industries
29. Brian Elliott, JPM Chase
    
30. Joseph Fiksel, Center for Resilience, OSU (CETI Member)
31. Carol Fleming, ccfleming79@hotmail.com
    
32. Michael Freitas, OSU Medical Center (CETI Member)
    
33. Randall Glassgow, Cardinal Health
    
34. Diane Griffin, State Auto
35. Bob Gustafson, Director, EEIC, OSU
    
36. Mark Harris, Microsoft
    
37. Dale Hays, TDCI (CETI Member)
38. Tim Haynes, TechColumbus
39. Dave Hudak, OSC
    
40. John Huston, Pillar Technology (Panelist)
41. Carlos Isaza, USABQ
    
42. Pankaj Jain, Nationwide
43. Scott Jackson, Progressive Medical
    
44. James Jeyraj, CETI
    
45. Gene Johnson, Gap Inc.
46. Keith Johnson, Grange Insurance (CETI Member)
47. Mark Juras, Great Migrations
    
48. Florian Kirchoff, Qwest
49. Mark Long, Emergitech
50. David Moyer, Emergitech
    
51. Matt Lewis, Gap Inc. (panelist)
    
52. Brian Link, Toobla
53. Igor Malkiman, Qwest
54. Monica McJunkin, EdgeCase, LLC
55. Scott Minor, Consultant
    
56. Madan Mohan, Nationwide
    
57. Mike Milligan, Progressive Medical
    
58. Ajay Mittal, STRS, Ohio
59. Joe O'Brien, EdgeCase, LLC
60. Dan Pachko, Worthington Industries
61. Jeff Perry, Pillar Technologies
62. Bill Phillips, OUS-OIT (CETI Member)
    
63. Kristen Puckett, Bostech
64. Jay Ramanathan, Director, CETI
65. Rajiv Ramnath, Director, CETI
    
66. Patricia Reed, STRS, Ohio
67. Bob Rhoads, EEIC, OSU
68. Susan Rising, Ohio Health
    
69. Ed Rudd, MDK-LLC
70. Danny Russell, State Auto
    
71. John Schaffer, MHE (CETI Member)
72. Brenda Settle, iQor
    
73. Roy Singham, Founder, Thoughtworks (Panelist, CETI Member)
74. Wendy Smolinsky  iQor
75. Dharmesh Sorathia, ICC
    
76. Jason Strle, JPM Chase
77. Jen Stille , Thoughtworks (Panelist, CETI Member)
78. Mike Teets, OCLC
79. Mohan Viddam, Halcyon Solutions
80. James Walton, OSU-OIT
    
81. Jim Wasil, BWC, Ohio
    
82. Cam Wolff, Nationwide (Panelist)
83. Steve Womers, Nationwide Inc. (CETI Member)
    
84. Eric Zechman, Grange Insurance (CETI Member)
85. Dave Zuppo, Nationwide Insurance (CETI Member)
    

There will also be 40 or so graduate and senior undergraduate students present. Please do seek them out and interact with them.

The program for the Industry Day is below:

• 8:30-9:00 am: Registration and networking
• 9:00-9:10: Welcome: Randolph Moses, Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering
  
• 9:00-10:00 am: Introduction to CETI. Overview of CETI and CERCS research and other initiatives. Rajiv Ramnath, CETI.
  
• 10:00-10:30 am: Break and networking
  
• 10:30-11:30: Agile and the Economy: Keynote. Roy Singham, Founder, Thoughtworks Inc. Roy's bio is below.
  
• 11:30-1:00 pm: CETI Projects Poster Showcase. Undergraduate Capstone Projects Showcase. Lunch for registered visitors
  
• 1:00-2:30 pm: EA Forum: Agile in the Enterprise Panel. Panelists and theme below.
  
• 2:30-3:00 pm: Overflow and wrap-up

Roy Singham is founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc. With more than 20 years of technology and executive management experience, Roy is a globally-renowned information technology thought leader. He has authored technology-related columns in various industry publications, and is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide. Roy and ThoughtWorks are recognized experts in Enterprise Architecture, Agile development, large scale software development including highly distributed teams, Open Source Software, Ruby, .NET and Web Services.

During the last five years, Roy has provided management services to clients in the insurance, mortgage, energy, leasing, retail and software development industries. He has also directed multi-million dollar projects at clients including Caterpillar Financial Services, Dixons Group, Progressive Insurance and Transamerica. Roy's management style combines comprehensive study of emerging technologies, the ability to build highly motivated teams, strong personal determination and innovative flair.

One of Roy's passions is evolving cultural and organizational patterns to create the most advanced internally and externally socially networked Consultancies in the industry. Roy studies and drives the innovative cultural changes that enable ThoughtWorks to remain the world's most influential company in the arena of custom business software development.

The EA Forum will have a panel-based theme as follows:

Information Technology organizations that support large enterprises are being asked to do more with less. Agile practices, which so far have achieved acceptance for small-to-medium sized application projects, have become increasingly relevant in large and complex enterprises as a means of delivering business value cheaper, faster and with higher quality.

Adopting Agile in enterprises has unique challenges. Enterprises have established structured practices, systems and organizations, and the conflict between these structure and Agile have to be resolved.

Panelists from Gap Inc., Nationwide Insurance, Pillar Technology, Thoughtworks and CETI will address these above issues by presenting their unique experiences relevant to Agile in the enterprise.

Panel program is as follows:  

• Overview of Agile: Rajiv Ramnath, CETI
  
• Panel theme and panelists: Rajiv Ramnath, CETI
  
• Panel presentations (10 mins each): Final order TBD.
• Agile practices at Gap Inc.: Matt Lewis and Peter Dean, Gap Inc.
  
• Agile practices at Nationwide: Cam Wolff, Nationwide Inc.
  
• Perspectives as a client of Agile: Tom Bihari, Nationwide Inc.
  
• Introducing Agile at the entry-level: Aman Kumar, CETI, OSU
  
• Making test-driven development work in the Enterprise: John Huston, Pillar Technologies
  
• Agile benchmarking: cross-company perspectives on Agile: Jen Stille, Thoughtworks
  
• Audience questions (30 mins)
• An inventory of Agile resources (5 mins): Jen Stille
  

To - how shall I say - pique your interest, the panelists have provided position statements, as follows:

• Matt Lewis/Peter Dean: We will jointly present Agile practices we use at the enterprise level within Gap - such as (a) maintaining the same cadence across entire organizations, (b) our continuous integration process and (c) Organizational changes to seperate out project specific vs domain architect roles.
• Cam Wolff: I will present the unified Agile practices we have customized to use at Nationwide - the 21 tea leaves as I call them.
• Tom Bihari: I will talk from my viewpoint as a large program "client" of the agile lines - that is, a consumer of Agile. Since most large enterprises are not and cannot be 100% Agile we have to take a hybrid approach with a mix of project methodologies that all interact.
• Aman Kumar: I will talk about our experiences in teaching agile practices to students, as a proxy for how Agile practices may be introduced to entry-level engineers.
• As part of this, I will also introduce a best practices framework developed through a collaboration with academia, for capturing Agile experiences for repeatability and continuous improvement,
• John Huston: John's topic for today will be "Test Driven Everything". There are numerous books, whitepapers, and other information sources that showcase the value of improved code quality through a focus on unit tests during coding. This discussion will highlight the benefits of taking a test-centric view on all aspects of development projects and not just on the coding portion.
• Jen Stille: I will close the panel and kickoff the discussion with a presentation on my experiences as an Agile consultant across different companies - large and small - and talk about constraints within organizations that determine the decisions to be made around the adoption of Agile practices, such as the length of an iteration, tools to be adopted, and so on. At the end, I will present an inventory of resources available  for Agile.

------------------------------------------- CETI and the CETI EA Forum ----------------------------------

The CETI EA Forum: The CETI EA Forum is a collaboration that seeks to share at a deep level learning and experiences about a wide range of key topics of critical importance to professionals in enterprise IT. For those who have not attended this forum in the past, see: https://www.ceti.cse.ohio-state.edu/ceti/enterprise-architecture-research-forum/CETI-EA-Forum-Introduction-2007-10-03.pdf for more details.

CETI: CETI is a federally-sponsored National Science Foundation (NSF) program research that aims to have a direct impact on the economic development of this region through highly relevant knowledge creation, and the development of a highly competent workforce. For more on CETI see: http://www.ceti.cse.ohio-state.edu.

Regards,

Rajiv