Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« 'The Only Way is Through SOA' -- Lessons Learned at a University | Main | How Farm Credit Turned Its Silos into a 'Pinwheel' » February 01, 2007New Association for SOA Leaders Focuses on 'City Planning' as a Metaphor I was listening to an interview Gian Trotta just conducted with The Open Group's Allen Brown, when something dawned on me. Open Group had just announced a new association formed to promote the professionalism of SOA leaders, but doesn't even mention SOA. Brown doesn't use the term SOA, and the press release doesn't mention SOA. Yet, it's obviously about SOA, and the reason Open Group launched the association is because of a dearth of SOA-savvy professionals to meet the rising demand in the market. An oversight? Definitely not. Rather, it may be a understanding that the term SOA (but not the principles) may have a limited shelf life. The Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA), a professional association for enterprise architects, has been founded with the hope of lasting the ages. In a previous career, I was director of a management association, AMS, that was originally established in 1919, and currently work closely with the SHARE independent IBM user group, which has been around since 1955. A group that is able to meet very fundamental career requirements and is responsive to changing member requirements can look forward to decades of growth. I have seen other professional groups that were latched too tightly to technology waves rise and sink quickly as the wave subsided. It appears that Brown and the Open Group decision-makers very astutely kept the term SOA out of the founding documents simply because no one knows what people may be calling it five or ten years down the road. I would not be surprised if vendors begin backing away from the term 'SOA' at some point in the near future and begin to glom onto something newer and trendier. What we call SOA today may be "Event Driven Architecture" or "Software as a Service" or even "Enterprise 3.0" by 2010. The group's goal is to set and promote professional standards, "much like the fields of law and accounting." The effort builds on the group's TOGAF certification for both professionals and products, which does address SOA as an underlying architecture. More significantly, the founding of the professional association also signifies a recognition by the industry that people need to be designated to lead the charge to the principles of SOA. The goal, Open Group says, is to "effectively align IT with business goals, organizations must increasingly adopt a city planner perspective of the enterprise. This has created strong demand for a new class of highly skilled professionals called enterprise architects who can communicate effectively with every level of their organization." My colleague Gian Trotta just posted a podcast with Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group (posted here), in which he describes the need for a professional class of enlightened architects to lead the charge. It's about breaking down the silos, Brown said. "Many organizations have managed to break down the silos and barriers within and between their enterprises, getting people working cross-functionally," he observed. "But the issue they face in a lot of ways is that the data that they require, and the information they require is buried in silos and applications that were constructed for very good reasons, and will remain for a long time within the silos. Now we need to rise up above that, and not just take a single application view, but take a city planner view across the enterprise. And to do that, we need someone who can take that city planner, that big picture view." The enterprise architect is just the person who can take this 30,000-foot view, Brown continued. "The enterprise architect has got to have expertise that spans business, IT, and data architecture. They've got to have a broad understanding of each. They don't need to be deep technical experts, but they need to have a sufficient understanding. of technology. They also have to have an appreciation of the business side -- a 'city planning' view of the enterprise." Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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