Excerpts from recent interview of Sandy Carter, responsible for driving IBM's cross-company, worldwide SOA marketing initiatives

The three business entry points for SOA are people, process, and information. The two technical entry points are connectivity and reuse.

The five most common questions from customers who are beginning their SOA journey are usually:
Can I still use my existing software and hardware?
Where do I begin with SOA?
Is SOA for large companies only?
How do I gain the much-needed SOA skills?
How do I prove the value of SOA to the executives in my organization

First, SOA is specifically designed to protect existing IT investments in software and hardware. The most successful SOA deployments are found at those companies that begin with a view of SOA as a long-term business strategy. These companies approach SOA incrementally, through one of the five entry points cited above, and continuously measure and monitor its success at every step along the way.

For those companies that are expanding their SOA, the questions are usually about, "how do I document and share my business processes?" To do this, it's important that the SOA initiative includes a strong governance strategy to make sure that its services can be easily managed, monitored, and reused while ensuring only best practices are shared.

In terms of developing skills, it's clear that the industry is facing a serious SOA IT skills shortage. In fact, a recent study found that 56 percent of IBM customers cited lack of skills, mainly individuals with a blending of IT technical understanding and business process acumen, as the leading inhibitor to SOA.

To address the SOA skills shortage, IBM recently announced new tools and certification programs to help organizations develop teams of individuals with so-called "T-shaped" skills, which encompass both deep business skills, represented by the horizontal line of the "T," and technical understanding, represented by the vertical line.

IBM recognizes that a successful SOA strategy requires both IT and business executives to collectively map out goals and illustrate the value of the SOA project. To this end, IBM offers free, online assessment tools to help executives at companies of all sizes determine their organization's business and IT needs. For example, IBM's SOA Business Analyzer helps an organization identify its greatest assets and opportunities that are ripe for an SOA project.

Also, the IBM BPM with SOA ROI Assessment Tools helps organizations assess their Business Process Management (BPM) readiness through 10 simple questions. It then delivers a BPM score, assesses an organization's position to realize benefits from BPM, and provides recommended next steps. Through this assessment, both IT and business executives can better understand the business value of an SOA strategy.