The Roundtable kicks off with each panelist presenting a brief overview on their view of Service Oriented Architecture in the public sector, including the challenges, any guidance they might have and success stories/lessons learned.

Up first was Victor Harrison, who described two case studies that illustrate how the public sector is in various stages of SOA adoption. He talked about the need to look at SOA from three points of view: executive, operational and "ground floor." He also spoke about how SOA is more than just a technical discussion. Bill Vass reiterated the point by talking about how SOA is more of a people problem than a technical one. He talked about how the transition to SOA is easier if the organization is already accustomed to a distributed process/environment/architecture. He also mentioned that in his experience, very few organizations have SOA environments that go beyond organizational boundaries. Kshemendra Paul stressed three main points: Listen to your customers; Talk to them in their own language; and Make their biggest problem your own. In expanding on those topics he discussed the importance of discovering the business or mission problem; not introducing a new vocabulary when discussing SOA and to focus on the biggest problem: governance. After the three panelists gave their overview, the discussion continued to further explore the issue of governance and branched into comments on re-use and lessons learned. The roundtable concluded with the panelists answering questions and comments from the audience.

Public Sector SOA Thought Leaders:

• Victor Harrison, Partner, CSC
• Bill Vass, President & COO, Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc.
• Kshemendra Paul, Chief Architect, US Office of Management & Budget
  
  Moderator: Brenda Michelson, Program Director, SOA Consortium