SOA is an enterprise strategy certainly. Nevertheless, we recognize that the early champions SOA - those who recognize the enterprise value proposition - are in the IT department. As of such, SOA is wrongly shoved into the "technology box" in the press and in organizations. This mislabeling impedes organizational acceptance of SOA and, more importantly, constrains IT organizations from adopting a strategy that lets them rapidly innovate across the enterprise, positively impact corporate strategy, and drive revenue and profit.

To spur enterprise-wide understanding and acceptance of SOA, the SOA Consortium works with IT leaders and SOA champions to help them communicate to business leaders, business analysts, and project managers the value of designing the business around processes that can be precisely defined, carefully captured, found again, and optimized. Not only must supporting IT infrastructure be organized on SOA architectural principles, the business needs to get value out of better-organized business activities and processes, both across the enterprise and throughout the supply- or value-chain. To accomplish this goal requires recognition, change, and innovation in the IT organization, but also throughout the organization. That requires education.

The SOA Consortium is committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. Our membership is made up almost entirely of end users who have been on the front lines of this education campaign in their own organizations, and a few visionary sponsors including BEA, Cisco, IBM, SAP, and Sparx Systems. Organizations including government agencies, large retailers, transportation leaders, travel companies, financial services providers, and insurance companies have come together to share their experiences and help get the word out that SOA is a business agility story.

To help educate the market about SOA, the SOA Consortium has chartered several working groups to target specific issues. For example, the EA2010 working group in the SOA Consortium's community of practice has been actively discussing and defining the next-generation role of enterprise architecture. Specifically, what enterprise architecture looks like - its organization, practices, and people - in a business-driven service-oriented world. They have developed an on-demand webinar that covers a wide range of enterprise architecture concerns, including catalyzing business change, picking up business smarts, shifting focus to business architecture, managing enterprise architecture, participating in strategy and delivery, and winning enterprise constituents.

The Promoting Business-Driven SOA - "Executive Suite SOA" working group has published "lessons learned" from those who have stepped into the great unknown already, completed SOA projects, and lived to tell about it. Organizational Case studies from a broad cross-section of industries representing a variety of project sizes and scopes that have made the transition are critically important to those of us facing the issues today.

The SOA Consortium has also invited experts to discuss hot topics in SOA including Governance and the latest one on the relationship between SOA and Business Process Management (BPM).

One final project to mention: the SOA Consortium Army Adoption Project was just recently launched and is a unique opportunity for members to guide and collect a success story in real-time, as SOA transforms the operations of an enormous enterprise. The U.S. Army is a huge and distributed enterprise with systems and system of systems on every imaginable platform. Driven by the need to develop and deploy solutions against a more flexible architecture that can be more responsive to change, easier to maintain, and less costly, the Army has decided to transition from approaches that promote stovepipe solutions to those based on SOA. And one of the key tactics enabling this transition is the description of a business-centric SOA Lifecycle Management Methodology (LCMM) that focuses on business principles, architecture guidance, governance, funding and acquisition, and change management.

All of this content is readily available on the SOA Consortium Web site (www.soa-consortium.org) and is just a small sample of the work that our members are doing. Through deliverables like the lessons-learned case studies, and by speaking out at industry events and through podcasts and webinars, the SOA Consortium and its members are striking a blow against the old "SOA is technology" myth and redirecting the conversation to the promise of SOA as the key to business agility. Why not join us?