SOA Consortium Elects Steering Committee

The SOA Consortium, an advocacy group of end users, service providers
and solution vendors centered on fostering service-oriented architecture
(SOA) technologies, has elected its Steering Committee and established
a new strategy group. The Consortium is also looking at building a case
study with one of the larger potential SOA users -- the U.S. Army. SOA
is a way of handling loosely coupled applications across various silos,
and the Army presents a tough case. It has multiple solutions running
on different platforms in spread-out locations. The Army currently is
conducting a Lifecycle Management Methodology (LCMM) project for its
software operations and is looking at SOA as a way to manage its
infrastructure in a less costly manner. The LCMM project is focusing on
architecture, governance and change management issues, among others.
The Consortium eventually hopes to add the Army to its SOA case studies
list, which presents success-story summaries of SOA projects across
various industries, big and small. From the announcement: "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... 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.).