Is our SOA learning?

December 12th, 2008 by Kyle Gabhart

On a South Carolina campaign stop in January 2000, George Bush asked the immortal question: “Is our children learning?” Then again seven years later, Bush told a group of New York school children: “Childrens do learn.” YouTube video of both statements is available here. So I ask the question: Is our SOA learning?

As I think back on the SOA engagements that I have been involved in throughout 2008, the importance of education and skills development becomes crystal clear. I’ve blogged on the subject of SOA education many times. Of course others within the industry have also seen these challenges:

Sober SOA (Chuck Allen)
Re-think your SOA training strategy (Ronald Schmeltzer)
IBM survey reveals SOA skills gap (Lorraine Lawson)
Which will kill SOA fastest: no money or no skills? (Joe McKendrick)

At first glance, SOA education seems to be a fairly straightforward affair:

Get a couple of smart IT folks and have them do some research and self-education
Select an ESB vendor after detailed analysis and proof-of-concept work
Buy a block of training from your vendor
Implement SOA and rake in the ROI

The reality of the matter is a bit more complicated than this, however. SOA education must emphasize alignment with business drivers, effective governance, comprehensive solution methodology, and the development of new technologies and solution patterns. Vendor-specific training, while helpful, should come much later in the process, after there is a clear vision regarding service orientation and one or more vendor solutions are selected in alignment with that enterprise vision.

Complete SOA education

Rather than an ad-hoc training approach or one in which personnel are simply expected to “pick it up”, SOA education must be approached from a wholistic perspective. Complete SOA education involves three key elements: methodology, governance, and technical skills, all of which must be properly aligned with the organization’s business drivers and hence the ultimate motivation for enterprise SOA adoption.

In my next several posts, I will explore each of these three aspects of SOA education in more detail. Until then, feel free to get a high-level understanding of these concepts via a whitepaper I recently wrote with two of my colleages at Web Age — “SOA Training ROI”.

UPDATE: Joe McKendrick noticed the post and wrote about it here. In addition to having a great sense of humor, he also pointed out that Gartner had noted the lack of SOA skills and expertise in a report as recently as November.

Posted in SOA |

One Response

WSOAC#40 - REST patterns and anti-patterns - Service Endpoint Says:
December 16th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
[…] Gabhart - Is our SOA learning? - On a South Carolina campaign stop in January 2000, George Bush asked the immortal question: “Is […]

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