Abstract:

Aon Hong Kong is the regional headquarters for Aon Asia - the 15-country Asian arm of Aon Corporation. Worldwide, Aon is the largest reinsurance broker and second largest insurance broker in the world.

This session presents the journey Aon Hong Kong takes in their search of an appropriate architecture framework that can add value to the business units and the enterprise as a whole, but at the same time can take into account the traditionally conservative nature of the insurance business, the unavoidable existence of legacy systems and practices, and the need to transform and breakthrough.

After various large and small scale attempts, instead of making a one-off huge technology decision of applying a fixed and established EA framework to the business, Aon has chosen a path that is more of an evolution than a revolution. It started off by establishing and agreeing on fundamental architectural principles, and then based on these, gradually build, transform, align, integrate, and replicate various components, modules, and systems, both at the application and infrastructure levels. The presentation also describes how various challenges re-enforce that a common enterprise mindset which promotes true cooperation and sharing within the organization, and that extends to leverage on regional and global standard and effort is necessary to help all stakeholders achieve more and beyond.

Our experience highlights that building an Enterprise Architecture is not a technology project, nor is it a "get a vendor in and fix it for us" project, it is a true partnership between IT and business to come up with a simple, consistent, practical, and flexible business and technology model that takes into the needs, constraints, complexity, and objectives both at the business and corporate levels. It is a set of principles, an approach, and an attitude that the whole organization adopts and embraces. It is a journey that has a beginning, and it should never end.

Abstract:

For Enterprise Architects who are leading a transformation, no single model guarantees success. Transformation requires strong leadership and typically raises questions like: What is my role in the transformation? How do I challenge the status quo and articulate a clear shared vision? Where do I find information to influence my organisation and create a network of support? How do I translate my story into a transformation journey? Who are the right people to drive the journey and what about the ones who struggle? How do I make the transformation relevant to the people in my organisation?

Leaders of transformation need to start with changing the dialogue within their organisation based on a strong vision and a compelling story. To build this compelling story they need to capture enterprise and industry specific knowledge. Many organisations have captured this knowledge and have developed scenarios and "prototypes" that they use as a reference to rethink and reshape their organisation.

Once the vision and story have been shaped and clearly articulated, it is the task of the leader to create the energy and motivation for change. Often, deeply engrained habits of acting and thinking in the culture of organisations need to change. Insight in these aspects is necessary to be able to drive the roadmap for the business transformation.

In this session we will cover leadership in transformation, how to change the dialogue and plan your transformation.

Abstract:

In most large companies, no project budget would be big enough to reengineer the complete application landscape of the whole enterprise. Evolutionary approaches have to be chosen to limit cost and risk. Introducing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is such an evolutionary approach, since it allows building on existing functionality. SOA allows for reuse, which accelerates the time-to-market and reduces the cost of application development.

However, reusing the existing business logic does not improve the architecture of the legacy applications. Often, introducing a SOA means building a thin layer of services on top of legacy systems which remain unchanged. But reusing a monolithic legacy system means that some of its major negative properties persist: Since any change of a service requires modifying the business logic of the underlying legacy system, changes can be slow and expensive.

To overcome this problem, more than just "reuse through services" is necessary. The internal structure of the IT landscape has to keep agile enough to react on new business requirements while still being cost-efficient in maintenance. We have to get more out of our existing code: functional redundancies have to be eliminated, dependencies have to be reduced and the application landscape has to align with the business.

None of this can be accomplished with monolithic systems or with a tightly entangled application landscape. Even wrapping these systems with a SOA is not enough. Transforming the legacy application landscape into a component-oriented architecture is the necessary next step. The clean structure represented by the services on the surface has to be applied to the internals of the legacy systems as well. We have to reshape our existing code to be agile enough to cope with new requirements.

Based on the successful service-oriented architecture of CREDIT SUISSE and an ongoing project to disentangle the mainframe application landscape, we shall discuss how:

Domain or component models govern development.

The right services are designed for reuse.

Legacy applications are transformed.

This session addresses these questions, specifically covering topics such as identifying the business’ goals, aligning your architecture to meet these goals, setting key performance indicators and measuring performance, setting and managing expectations, targeting and satisfying significant stakeholders, marketing your progress, and justifying the Return on Investment of the whole initiative. This session will also provide advise on navigating the labyrinth of an organization’s political structure.

Title: Bringing EAs, SAs, and TAs in realizing
         architecture driven modernization


Abstract:

In this inaugural keynote, Sunil is going to set the theme & pace for the summit. He will discuss about the current status of architecture adoption and look at the typical problems and issues related to architecture driven modernization. Is the problem with the architecture team structure, reporting structure or is that we don't have well-defined problems yet? How does CTO & Chief Architect co-operate?

Also, he is going to touch upon the issues like:
1· What about architecture frameworks and how do we
    extend them to domain frameworks and the necessary     artifacts?
2· How does architecture styles like MDA, SOA fits with EA     frameworks?
3· Can we define & measure architecture alignment & related     metrics? A big question is how?
4· Does it make sense to look at the system level
    architecture artifacts in absence of enterprise level
    artifacts?
5· Does the globalization (aka outsourcing ;-)..) has an
    impact on architecture roles & activities? How?