Whether or not you and your IT team have got your heads around service-oriented architecture (SOA),  your bosses will be missing a trick if they don’t embrace the concept, according to a survey just published by IBM.

The survey was conducted by the Link Group and consisted of a sampling of clients at the IBM’s recent Impact 2007 event in the States. The event drew more than 4,200 technical and business people from around the world to discuss the reuse of existing technology with SOA to more closely align it with business goals.

The survey revealed that 67 per cent of the respondents said the key decision makers responsible for moving to an SOA strategy are business leaders including C-level executives and business managers. Additionally, 65 per cent of the delegates said that business leaders are also primarily responsible for selecting an IT partner to help achieve business goals in an SOA.

"Business leaders not engaged in the SOA decision making process will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager business consulting services and SOA, IBM. "With its focus on optimising and automating specific business processes and eliminating redundant ones, it is business leaders that will drive the adoption of SOA from early stages to enterprise-wide adoption."

Impact 2007 was aimed specifically at organisations that were already au fait with SOA. Even so, some of the surveys findings seem to back up some of the more heady estimates of SOA adoption from the major analysts of late. 40 per cent of respondents indicated that between 10 and 30 per cent of overall IT budgets are being spent on SOA projects. 53 per cent of respondents indicated that their budgets for SOA projects for 2007 increased between 10 and 20 per cent compared to 2006.

Given that many of the forward-thinking projects System i architects are involved with today could be said to contain elements of SOA, it would therefore seem judicious to label them as such to gain funding. Indeed, 75 per cent of the respondents said the primary reason for implementing SOA is to meet new business goals, versus 25 per cent that cited fixing existing business problems.

However, there is a shortage of required SOA skills, according to the survey. Half the respondents said they had less than 25 per cent of the necessary SOA skills to help their company meet long term goals. However, 80 per cent of respondents are increasing SOA skills in their company this year, with more than 60 per cent focused on retraining existing staff on SOA. Again, it would seem that SOA is definitely the magic three letter acronym that IT folk should be dropping to their boards when it comes to training.

SOA dovetails very nicely with Big Blue’s ‘On Demand’ message, and so it has announced a plethora of new initiatives including eight new industry-specific SOA roadmaps spanning six industries and new programmes from its services arm. IBM’s most eye-catching SOA announcement, though, has to be that it is developing a new computer game called Innov8, a  3-D business process management simulator aimed at both techies and business people.

Following on from IBM’s recent forays into the virtual world of Second Life, the game will allow players to visualise how an SOA affects different parts of the organisation. “Together, users can literally see business processes, identify bottlenecks, and explore 'what if' scenarios before the SOA is deployed,” says IBM. Which, if nothing else, should make budget meetings with the board more interesting.

Seamus Quinn, editor.