The Power of Model-Driven Business Transformation, seminar

• March 17, 2006: 10:00am - 11:00am
• Contact: Pravin Varaiya
• Location: 400 Cory Hall, Hughes Room

"The Power of Model-Driven Business Transformation"
Dr. David Cohn
Director, Business Informatics, IBM Watson

Date: Friday, March 17, 2006
Time: 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. 
Location: 400 Cory Hall, Hughes Room

Abstract
Business Process Re-engineering", "Operational Excellence",
and "The Adaptable Organization" have all promised to transform the
enterprise.  However, they have not been able to connect the board room
vision to business operations and data center reality.  Enterprises are
complex systems, and transforming them needs the kind of structured thinking
engineers use for such problems.  As part of its evolution to
services-oriented research, IBM Research has develop Model-Driven Business
Transformation (MDBT) to address this need.  This approach extends software
engineering's model-driven development technique to map an enterprise's
strategic objectives to its operations, formally specifying business design
and clearly reflecting business intent.  Just as object-oriented programming
changed the paradigm of writing software, MDBT uses a new abstraction, the
Business Artifact, to redefine business modeling.  By replacing classic
verb-centric business process modeling with a noun-centric business operation modeling, MDBT has clarified business
operations and simplified measurement and monitoring.  In its early
applications, MDBT has reduced excess overhead in the operation of an IBM
business service, fostered effective collaboration among product managers at
a large retailer and enabled meaningful monitoring of data management for a
major insurance company.  MDBT links its model of business operations to a
platform-independent IT model which can be mapped to various platforms, and
is especially well-suited for service-oriented architectures.  It has
substantially reduced implementation effort and greatly simplified
adaptation to changing business needs.  It works because it moves IT
thinking up the stack from implementing infrastructure to improving
operations.

Biography
Dr. David Cohn is Director, Business Informatics at IBM's T. J. Watson
Research Center.  He supervises a research team focused on modeling,
transforming and integrating information and business structures for on
demand solutions and directs IBM's worldwide research strategy in support of
Business Design & Implementation.  Prior to his current position, Dr. Cohn
directed IBM's Austin Research Laboratory in Texas and served as Director,
Strategic Projects at Armonk.  Before joining IBM, he was Professor of
Computer Science & Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at
Notre Dame.