IBM: SOA Fits Skills Shortage to a ‘T’
May 22, 2007 Alex Woodie
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IBM said yesterday 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 this 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:
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