SOA Consortium Releases Three New Podcasts on SOA Centers of Excellence
Includes Two Case Study Presentations and a Hot Topic Roundtable Podcast

Needham, MA, USA – May 15, 2008 – The SOA Consortium™ today announced that three new podcasts on SOA Centers of Excellence are now available. There were two case study presentations on SOA Centers of Excellence, one by Melvin Greer, SOA Chief Architect, Lockheed Martin and another by Richard Reba, Director, SOA Center of Excellence, CSC. The SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: SOA Center of Excellence is also available. To access the podcasts, recorded at the SOA Consortium meeting in Washington, D.C. in March, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/coe. 

Melvin Greer, SOA Chief Architect, Lockheed Martin
Melvin’s main theme in his presentation is that the competency center's role is to change behavior, not of business, but IT. He spoke to common SOA disorders, and identified some of the symptoms that indicate a competency center is needed. He also offered insights on running a successful competency center based on his experience at Lockheed Martin.

Richard Reba, Director, SOA Center of Excellence, CSC
During his presentation, Richard describes the build out of CSC's Center of Excellence in the context of building CSC's SOA Business. Of particular note are the Lessons learned including the need to form a point of view on SOA and to establish credibility within CSC as a SOA leader. He described how they developed a vision for how SOA could be leveraged by CSC and created a business case for a SOA Center of Excellence that supports CSC strategy. He goes on to describe some of the steps they took to build out the Center of Excellence and to describe the results of their efforts.

Center of Excellence Skills Roundtable
During the Center of Excellence Skills Roundtable, Center of Excellence Leaders, Industry Experts and SOA Consortium Members discussed the critical skills a center of excellence should provide in order for an organization to deliver business-driven SOA solutions. Roundtable thought leaders were:

• David Butler, Vice President and Chief SOA Evangelist, HP
• Melvin Greer, SOA Chief Architect, Lockheed Martin
• Bruce Henderson, Chief Scientist, Savant
• Richard Reba, Director, SOA Center of Excellence, CSC
• Moderated by Brenda Michelson, SOA Consortium Program Director

The goal of the Roundtable was to hold a broad discussion on what skills really belong in the Center of Excellence (COE) for SOA and what skills do not belong. To start the discussion, each participant was asked to briefly respond to three questions:

• What are the three most critical skills that you should staff in your SOA COE?
• Where do those skills come from—how do you develop those skills or find those skills on the street?
• Are there any skills that they often see in the Center of Excellence that really just do not belong there?

After each Thought Leader provided their views, the conversation continued with input and questions from the audience on what should a really strong business-focused SOA Center of Excellence look like.

To listen to each of the podcasts, or to download the case study presentations and roundtable transcript, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/coe. 

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.