Collective SOA Wisdom: A Consortium Experience - member guest post from Dr. Burc Oral

SOA-C member Burc Oral of Cell Exchange reports on the Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference:

The Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was held on October 1-2, 2007 at MITRE. The meeting focused on information sharing environments for enterprise architecture, semantic interoperability, Service-Oriented Architecture, data and information architecture, and service systems.

The Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was started as an outlet for the SOA CoP (Community of Practice) to align many Industry Advisory Council (IAC) initiatives around Service Oriented Architecture. The IAC brings industry and government executives together to exchange information, support professional development, improve communications and understanding, solve issues and build partnership and trust, thereby enhancing the government's ability to serve the nation's citizenry. The SOA CoP provides the AIC sub-committees and the federal government with expertise and coordination in SOA Reference Models, Specifications and Standards, SOA Governance and SOA Implementation and Testing.

This recent meeting was well attended by industry and government participants because of the successful promotion and exposure of the event by the planning committee, which had started in June. The event was packed with key note speakers, panels, demos, tutorials, and poster sessions.

I talked about the collective SOA wisdom and endorsed the SOA Consortium experience as an advocacy organization. You can find more about this presentation on the SOA eGov site. I shared our mission to promote and enable business agility via Service-Oriented Architecture for the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses. I also briefed the community on our activities:

• Building awareness amongst the C-level executives on the cost, value, challenges and success factors of moving to SOA
• Establishing awareness and linkages between business operations and IT professionals on approaches for using SOA to enable business process improvement initiatives
• Enabling architects and senior development managers to sell, transition to, develop, and support a SOA in practice.

At the third meeting in early May 2007, the SOA Consortium was composed of two dozen companies. It was a great pleasure to report on the growth in membership to over 60.

There was great interest on our collective work which has been underway on three fronts: Promoting Business-Driven SOA, Generating Business Value from SOA, and Executing Business-Driven SOA.