SOA Consortium Releases New SOA Hot Topics
Roundtable Podcast on Public Sector SOA
Podcast Features Victor Harrison, CSC; Bill Vass, Sun Microsystems Federal;
and Kshemendra Paul, Office of Management & Budget

Needham, MA, USA – April 28, 2008 – The SOA Consortium™ today announced that a podcast and transcript of the SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: Public Sector SOA, recorded at the SOA Consortium meeting in Washington, D.C. in March is now available. To access the podcast, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcast-dc-ps-pr. 

The objective of the Public Sector SOA Roundtable was to generate a meaningful conversation between Thought Leaders and meeting attendees on the drivers, issues and available guidance for public sector Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption and management. This session was recorded and is now available as an on-demand podcast and as a downloadable transcript at http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcast-dc-ps-pr. 

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

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.

To hear the entire 54-minute conversation or to download the transcript, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcast-dc-ps-pr.

The next SOA Consortium meeting is in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on June 25-26, 2008. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium and attending the meeting should visit the website, http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org for more information. Visit the SOA Consortium’s SOA Insights blog at http://blog.soa-consortium.org. 

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About The SOA Consortium
The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, SAP AG, Savant, Sparx Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.

For more information, please visit http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org. 

Note to editors: SOA Consortium, OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.