1. Federal Communities of Practice: IBM Contributions
Brand L. Niemann,
Senior Enterprise Architect, US EPA
July 24, 2007

2. Introduction
Dr. Brand Niemann is a Senior Enterprise Architect in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency. His work on EPA and Interagency data architecture to facilitate electronic information sharing was recognized by Federal Computer Week in its 2006 Power Player Series Special Report and recently at the Gartner Spring Enterprise Architecture Summit Conference.
Brand is a recognized leader in the use of communities of practice (CoP) supported by Wiki technology to develop service systems and serves as Co-Chair of both the Federal Service-Oriented Architecture CoP and the Federal Semantic Interoperability CoP.

3. Introduction
In his 27 year government career he has been asked by senior government leadership to:
Chair the CIO Council’s Web Services Working Group;
Serve on the Federal Enterprise Architecture/OMB Solution Architects Working Group and the Data Reference Model (DRM) 1.0 Team;
Co-Chair the CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP);
Lead the Federal Enterprise Architecture/OMB DRM 2.0 Implementation Through Testing and Iteration Team;
Co-Chair the Federal SOA CoP; and
Serve as the Secretariat of the CIO Council’s Best Practices Committee.

4. IBM Contributions Semantic Interoperability CoP:
5th Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference, October 10-11, 2006:
Best Presentation: Chris Welty (IBM) for Interoperable Knowledge Representation for Intelligence Support (IKRIS), Chris Welti, IBM:
Special Conference 2, April 25, 2007:
Benjamin Szekely, IBM, Developing Semantic Web Tools at IBM:

5. IBM Contributions Service Oriented Architecture CoP:
January 26, 2006, Announcement:
Ali Arsanjani, IBM SOA Practice Lead, Co-Track Lead at 2nd Conference, October 30-31, 2006:
Maryann Hondo, IBM. Total SOA Assurance- A framework for SOA Security (Track Presentation):
IBM cuts ribbon on SOA institute (April 30, 2007):
and
Host Future SOA for E-Government Conference?

6. IBM Contributions Best Practices Committee:
March 19, 2007, BPC Meeting, Steps Toward a Science of Service Systems, Jim Spohrer, et al, IBM Almaden Research Center, IEEE, January 2007, pp :
Invited to participate in the Service Research and Innovation Initiative (SRII):
Invited to provide a Case Study on the Federal CIO Council for SRII’s Technology Services Research & Innovation Symposium, May 30th, Santa Clara Convention Center, California:
Participating in “becoming a service system” in our monthly BPC meetings: