With the advent of any new and revolutionary technological advance, comes the need for resources to support its growth. The announcement this week by the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) to help bring more validity and status to the title of Enterprise Architect by offering a professional association and certification is certainly a step in the right direction. More and more companies are seeing the benefits of implementing a service-oriented architecture to address numerous business and technology issues. These projects, however, are many times stalled by the lack of resources to drive the project.
And while the efforts of the AOGEA are helpful and will hopefully help draw more Architects into the talent pool, it’s going to take more to help keep the SOA bandwagon moving forward.
Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said more education is needed or SOA may be doomed by sheer lack of knowledge among the people trying to implement it. "The real thing that's holding SOA back is the lack of architectural experience," the analyst said. "Something has to be done. If this gap isn't filled I think the entire movement to service-oriented architecture could basically fail."
This is a pretty bold statement from Ron, but it is certainly not wholly unsupported. Just from my own personal experience in talking to clients looking to implement an SOA strategy, the number of experienced Architects is grossly lacking.
ZapThink and Excel Partner are also looking to address this talent shortage with the Architect Resource Center (ARC), but even this listing of qualified individuals can only go so far. Without education and experience, the SOA movement will have a much steeper hill to climb.
