News
SOA Consortium Elects Steering Committee
- By Kurt Mackie
- October 12, 2007
The SOA Consortium, an advocacy group of end users, service providers and solution vendors centered on fostering service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, has elected its Steering Committee and established a new strategy group. The Consortium is also looking at building a case study with one of the larger potential SOA users -- the U.S. Army.
SOA is a way of handling loosely coupled applications across various silos, and the Army presents a tough case. It has multiple solutions running on different platforms in spread-out locations. The Army currently is conducting a Lifecycle Management Methodology (LCMM) project for its software operations and is looking at SOA as a way to manage its infrastructure in a less costly manner. The LCMM project is focusing on architecture, governance and change management issues, among others.
The Consortium eventually hopes to add the Army to its SOA case studies list, which presents success-story summaries of SOA projects across various industries, big and small.
The Consortium's new strategy group is called "Generating Business Value From SOA." It aims to educate IT professionals on ways to connect business processes (such as BPM, Six Sigma, Lean and agile) with SOA.
The business process management-SOA combination appears to be one that the Consortium continues to embrace. It conducted a roundtable talk on the topic, focusing on four aspects of BPM-SOA, including business discipline, methodology, technology and the human element. The Consortium expects to post this talk soon on its Web site.
The Consortium's next meeting is planned for Dec. 12-13, 2007 in Burlingame, Calif. The group, which is sponsored by BEA Systems, Cisco Systems, IBM Corp., SAP AG and Sparx Systems, has grown rapidly, adding more than 50 members in its seven months of existence. More info on the SOA Consortium is available here.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc.