Kerrie Holley is usually synonymous with IBM. Well Kerrie Holley is indeed his own man. He has made a name for himself but he remains a loyal IBM fellow. He received his IBM fellowship in 2006. So he doesn’t mind being called IBM’s Kerrie Holley. He already knows who he is. He wasn’t like a lot of the other IBM fellows. He grew up poor in the South side of Chicago.
He was raised by his grandmother. He never knew who his father was. He was lucky enough to attract the attention of Sue Duncan who had a children’s center and who is the mother of Arne Duncan, the US secretary of Education. She sent him to private school. She helped Holley advance in his studies by getting him tutoring from university students. She told him to always finish what he started, whether it be reading a book or completing a project. She helped discipline him in a world where violence and mayhem were the norm and young black men found themselves in gangs or worse. Holley received his Bachelor of Arts degree at DePaul University and earned his Juris Doctorate at the DePaul University College of Law.
He is much sought after due to his contributions in the area of SOA development methods. He should be as he holds a co- patent for the first SOA maturity model and development method. He is a master at e-business Integration Solutions.
In 1986 he joined IBM and became CTO of IBM’s SOA Center of Excellence. He was chosen IBM’s distinguished Engineer in 2000. The fellowship he was appointed to in 2006, was founded in1962 by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., with the sole purpose of inspiring creativity and bringing together the most “Exceptional “technical minds in the company.
Holley thinks of himself as a work in progress. He focuses on up and coming trends and new technologies. He believes Web services (a subset of e-business on demand) is what’s current.
He is currently working on end to end advanced web development, adaptive enterprise architecture, conducting architecture reviews, service oriented architecture and software engineering practices.
What a mouth full. If some of you didn’t understand one word of that paragraph, you’re not alone. But believe me all this effects the way businesses do business the way we develop our websites, those of us who have gotten that far.
A SOA is a flexible set of design principles used during the phases of systems development and integration. A deployed SOA-based architecture will provide a loosely-integrated suite of services that can be used within multiple business domains.
Isn’t getting any better is it? I’m assuming most know what web development is? Adaptive enterprise architecture? Just think of it in the same way you think about architecture in a form of a work flow or data flow chart. It makes more sense to break it down to Enterprise architecture which is the structure or intricate components of an enterprise, its subsystems, which could be information assets, business thinking and technical infrastructure. It is the relationships between these subsystems, the interaction with the external environment, the terminology to use, and the principles set for the motif and development of an enterprise.
Anyway Kerrie Holley makes me want to understand more and more. I actually spent more time researching this stuff than I did in college; which means Holley has inspired at least one more people to explore and be creative. Hopefully if you have no idea what this all means, you’ll be inspired too.
