IT workers looking for help with concepts like service-oriented architecture and enterprise applications interoperability recently got a boost from two newly formed professional groups.
In February, the SOA Consortium emerged as a new organization with an ambitious goal: helping the Global 1000 succeed in implementing the SOA concept by 2010.
The group's founding members already have some skin in the game. BEA Systems, Cisco, IBM, and SAP all market products based on SOA technology. Early consortium members include Bank of America and HP, as well as the Integration Consortium and the Object Management Group, two groups dedicated to promoting best practices and standards for enterprise integration, a central tenet of the SOA concept.
A recent study by AMR Research indicates the breadth of the SOA Consortium's challenge. After analyzing responses from more than 1,000 IT workers across various industries, AMR analyst Ian Finley noted, "For most industries, SOA is still a future, with a minority of companies using it today."
Focusing efforts on the top tier of global companies won't up the odds of success significantly, either. "SOA adoption didn't differ significantly for companies with revenue between $100 million and $1 billion and those with revenue over $1 billion. Further, the perceived challenges and benefits of SOA differed little across company sizes," Finley wrote.
For information technology workers tasked with the similarly daunting job of integrating enterprise IT systems, the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) has emerged as a professional society that aims to keep members current with industry trends and tapped in to opportunities for professional development.
Launched in late January by the Open Group, an organization dedicated to "open standards and global interoperability," AOGEA is open to all interested individuals. Those seeking member status, however, must have ITAC (IT Architect Certification) or TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) certification.
AOGEA's goals "are to increase job opportunities for all of its members and increase their market value by advancing professional excellence, and to raise the status of the profession as a whole," according to a note on the group's Web site.
If recent studies are any indication, architects of IT interoperability will be hot commodities in the job market in coming years. Connecting, for instance, a manufacturing execution system to plant floor equipment such as PLCs and to enterprise systems such as an ERP backbone is the goal of many manufacturers. Yet, in Managing Automation's 2007 Integration poll, 45% of respondents report that integration efforts have begun, but that substantial work remains to be done.
The majority of these companies -- 58% -- are leaving the execution of that technology integration in the hands of either the IT department or a combination of IT and automation teams.
This article originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of Managing Automation.