IBM: SOA Fits Skills Shortage to a 'T'

Published: May 29, 2007

by Alex Woodie

IBM said last week that more than 4,500 of its customers have modeled their businesses around service oriented architecture (SOA), the latest sign that SOA is having a big impact in business IT. The revelation was made at its inaugural IMPACT 2007 conference being held last week in Orlando, Florida, where Big Blue stepped up its SOA drum-beating with an assortment of new certification, training, partnership, and marketing programs concerning "T-shaped" skills.

According to Steve Mills, head of IBM Software, SOA is having a real-world impact on businesses, as well as IBM's bottom-line. "SOA has been a growth engine for IBM as well as our customers because it gives companies the much-needed flexibility to focus on achieving business results without being hindered by the constructs of established infrastructures," Mills said in a press release.

Skills is one area where SOA is having a noticeable impact, specifically when it comes to matching business and technical skills. To address the skills shortage, IBM launched a series of tools and certification programs designed to accelerate so-called T-shaped skills, where the horizontal line of the "T" represents business skills, and the vertical line represents technical skills.

One of the new SOA tools designed to boost T-shaped skills is an interactive business performance monitoring (BPM) game called Innov8. IBM says the three-dimensional game, which is played with a joystick, is designed to "bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders" and help them understand how SOA affects different parts of the organization.

IBM made several other SOA-related announcements at the show, including:

• The launch of "IBM TV: Impact Channel," an online portal with Webcasts, podcasts, demos, white papers, and other resources to help people develop T-shaped skills
• New online and in-class courses to teach people T-shaped skills
• The creation of eight SOA Roadmaps to help companies in six industries follow the course to SOA adoption
• Six new professional services focused on SOA topics, including diagnostics, strategy, implementation planning, BPM via SOA, SOA design development, integration, and management
• A new version of IBM DB2 Dynamic Warehouse that integrates IBM's Information on Demand and SOA strategies to implement Dynamic Warehousing solutions
• A new SOA "governance strategy" that focuses on the overall process needed to govern the SOA environment, with an emphasis on registries and repositories.
• A new product called the IBM Rational Asset Manager which is designed to identify, manage, and govern the design, development and consumption of services in SOA.
• A new WebSphere Application Server feature pack that uses wizards to help users more easily build and reuse Web services.
• A new version of WebSphere Process Server on System z that is laser-focused on "automating people and information-centric business processes and consolidating mission critical elements of a business onto a single system."

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