SOA Consortium Releases New Podcast on “Records Management in a
Federal Service Oriented Environment” by Dr. Michael J. Kurtz

Needham, MA, USA – November 25, 2008 – The SOA Consortium™ today announced the availability of a podcast of the presentation by Dr. Michael J. Kurtz, Assistant Archivist for Records Services, Washington DC, National Archives and Records Administration, on “Records Management in a Federal Service Oriented Environment,” recorded at the SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando, Fl in September. To access the podcast, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-mk. 

Dr. Kurtz presented a case study on establishing Records Management in a Federal Service Oriented Environment. In an era of electronic war fighting, homeland security and expanding reach of the federal government, the need to share information is vital. Currently, the 300-plus federal agencies each have their own records management program, all with varying degrees of maturity. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) initiative is tasked with finding efficient and effective ways to manage and share information, and help federal agencies transfer their permanently valuable electronic records to the National Archives.

At the core of the multi-agency initiative was the definition of common records management services for use across all federal government agencies. Dr. Kurtz spoke of the challenges defining technology independent records management services that have the proper precision, yet are pliable for future requirements. Keys to the 18-agency community of practice’s success were requirements elicitation through modeling, Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) techniques and creating uniform semantics.

In addition to the service definitions, the team is evaluating a proposed Records Management Maturity Model (RM3). The hope is that agencies could use this model, if adopted, to assess their current business processes, tools and techniques to manage records and create transition plans. Dr. Kurtz pointed out that both the records management services and maturity models are envisioned as not necessarily government specific and therefore could be applicable to all industries.
Throughout the presentation, Dr. Kurtz engaged in Q&A with meeting attendees on cross-agency information sharing, funding models, MDA model formats and organizational change.

To hear all of the insights from Dr. Kurtz’s presentation, download the 58-minute podcast and accompanying slide presentation at http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-mk. 

Next Meeting; Information
The next SOA Consortium meeting is in Santa Clara, Calif., USA, on December 10-11, 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 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, Layer 7 Technologies, 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.