<geek>
You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype.
But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information technology. I have written before here about the potential for a service-oriented architecture to enable government to deliver the benefits of integrated information systems while limiting the civil liberties risks of a large identity database. And in a chapter in a new IBM book about transformation of government services, Capability, Capacity and Reform, I argue that instead of the government's vision of data processing warehouses, the way to create more efficient and customer-oriented public services is to build smaller and more flexible shared service modules based on a common, cross-government IT architecture.
So I was interested to see that Accenture has bet $450 million of its own money over the next three years in developing new service-oriented architecture functionality. That suggests that Accenture agrees that this is more than just hype.
Hat tip: Enterprise Web 2.0
</geek>
I think Accenture’s investment says three things about SOA:
John
I agree with you on all three points.
I hope that there are people in the UK government who are thinking about this. The opportunities offered by an international government information exchange model, for example, as part of an SOA architecture, could be enormous.
Owen
Yes indeed, the CTO Council (an "agent" of the cross-government CIO Council) are mandated to consider these things. To quote from their home page (my emphases):
There is a short news item about an EA workshop in late June in the latest IT Profession eBulletin (page 2).
John
Impressive. But do we really think the CTO Council has the authority to enforce the implementation of such standards across Government? It would involve a sea-change in the way that Departments think of their autonomy.
Owen