SOA Consortium Elects Steering Committee,
Charters New Strategy Group and Releases New Content
SOA Case Studies Released, New Podcast on SOA & BPM Recorded at
Meeting in Jacksonville, FL September 26-27, 2007

Needham, MA, USA – October 9, 2007 – The SOA Consortium™ met recently in Jacksonville, Florida where it elected its Steering Committee, chartered a new Strategy Group, kicked off the “SOA Consortium Army Adoption Project,” and recorded a new podcast on the relationship between SOA and BPM. 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. Sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, SAP AG and Sparx Systems.

Steering Committee Elected
Members of the SOA Consortium Steering Committee are recognized by the SOA community as leaders in strategies for adopting SOA as a business strategy. In addition to providing the Consortium with a leadership voice for defining overall strategy and direction of the organization, they also serve as spokespeople and advocates in conversations with the press, analysts and at industry events and conferences.

• Fill Bowen, IBM; Herbert Heinzel, H2O; Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz and Associates; Burc Oral, Cell Exchange; Mike Wons, Federal Signal; Ashwini Ahuja, SDG Corp; Jeff Davies, BEA Systems; Victor Harrison, CSC; Larry Johnson, Tether’s End; Sam Mancarella, Sparx Systems, Surekha Durvasula, Kohl’s Department Stores; Ian Foster, Cisco; Ashok Kumar, Avis Budget; John Schmidt, Integration Consortium; and Amit Sinha, SAP

New Strategy Group Chartered
The SOA Consortium charted the new Strategy Group “Generating Business Value from SOA.” Ashwini Ahuja, SDG, and Brian Erickson, Hitachi Consulting are leading this new strategy. The Generating Business Value from SOA strategy is focused on building awareness and linkages between business operations and information technology professionals on approaches for using SOA to enable business process improvement initiatives (e.g., BPM, Six Sigma, LEAN etc.).

Key constituents for the activities and deliverables of the Generating Business Value from SOA strategy include business process owners, business operations managers, BPM project champions, Six Sigma/LEAN/Agile practitioners, business project managers, business analysts, business architects, and IT project managers.

At the Jacksonville meeting, an initial working group was formed to determine the appropriate tactics to bridge the business disciplines, communities, methods and technologies of SOA
and BPM.

SOA Consortium Army Adoption Project
Victor Harrison, CSC and Lt. Col. Bill Robinson, US Army, gave a presentation on the SOA Lifecycle Management Methodology (LCMM) project and how the US Army and SOA Consortium can work together to achieve common goals.

The US Army (USA) is a huge and distributed enterprise with systems and system of systems on every imaginable platform. Driven by the need to develop and deploy solutions against a more flexible architecture that can be more responsive to change, easier to maintain, and less costly, the Army has decided to transition from approaches that promote stovepipe solutions to those based upon SOA. Therefore, one of the key tactics enabling this transition is the description of a business-centric SOA Lifecycle Management Methodology (LCMM) that focuses on business principles, architecture guidance, governance, funding and acquisition, and change management.

This is a major new project within the SOA Consortium to capture a case study of SOA adoption in a very large organization while it happens, while lending support to that project with experience from the many, varied SOA Consortium members.

New Content Developed

• SOA Case Studies Posted: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) aligns IT strategy with business strategy—by making those strategies one and the same. One of the major deliverables of the SOA Consortium and the Promoting Business-Driven SOA – “Executive Suite SOA” working group is “lessons learned” from those who have stepped into the great unknown already, completed SOA projects, and lived to tell about it. Case studies of organizations that have made the transition are critically important to those of us facing the issues today. Posted on the SOA Consortium website are case studies from a broad cross-section of industries representing a variety of project sizes and scopes. Visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/case-study-pr/ to view the case studies.
   
• SOA Hot Topic Roundtable: SOA-BPM Relationship Recorded: This roundtable discussion, which featured Ashwini Ahuja, SDG Corporation; Sooraj Balgobin, The SOA Monitor; Brian Erickson, Hitachi Consulting and moderated by SOA Consortium Program Director Brenda Michelson, covered key points, issues and opportunities across four aspects of the SOA-BPM relationship: business discipline, methodology, technology and the “human” element. The session, with also included input from SOA Consortium attendees, will be posted to the SOA Consortium Resource Hub shortly.

The next meeting of the SOA Consortium will take place in Burlingame, California, December 12-13, 2007. For more information visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/events.htm. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium 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 a new advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000 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 BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, SAP AG and Sparx Systems. Participants in the consortium to date include: Aberdeen Group, Inc., Adaptive, Inc., American Red Cross, Avis Budget Group, Bank of America, Bunge Agribusiness, Cambridge Technology Enterprise, Capability Measurement, Cape Clear Software, Inc., CellExchange, Inc., Center for Public-Private Enterprise, CGI Federal, Computer Sciences Corporation, Daugherty Business Solutions, eCube Systems, LLC, EDS, Equally Keen, Ltd., Evans Data Corporation, Federal Signal Corp., Fidelity Investments, Forestay, LLC, Fraunhofer FOKUS, General Services Administration, H2O GmbH, Helm Solutions Group, HP, Hitachi Consulting, Hurwitz & Associates, ICW Group, Integration Consortium, Interoperability Clearinghouse, iWay Software, Kohl's Department Stores, Lake Trail Partners, LLC, MAKE Technologies Inc., Maryfran Johnson & Associates, Model Driven Solutions, MomentumSI, Monsanto, OMG, Penn National Insurance, PricewaterhouseCoopers , SAIC, PHS Operation, Schlumberger Technology, SDG Corporation, Software AG, Sonoa Systems, TethersEnd Consulting, Thomas & Hebert, Torry Harris Business Solutions, TPP Global Services LLC, WebEx, Wells Fargo, and ZapThink, LLC. 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.