Survey hints at SOA skills shortages to come

IBM commissioned a survey of attendees at its recent SOA customer confab, and concluded that SOA -- at least among this group -- is finally evolving from an IT activity to that of a more strategic business initiative. IBM said that the strategic decisions to adopt SOA "are shifting away from the realm of IT staffers to business executives."

This sounds too good to be true, and flies in the face of all the discussion going on that says SOA is not too well understood in the executive suite. The survey, conducted for IBM by the Link Group among a sampling of the 4,700 clients at IBM's Impact 2007 event, found that 67 percent of respondents' SOA efforts "are business leaders including C-level executives and business managers."

But how representative is the survey of the world at large? After all, the folks attending Impact 2007 are the believers; they have already dove deep into the SOA way. The fact that they were even at this event for the week shows they had the funding and blessing of their organization's management. We can conclude that these results reflect trends at best-practices organizations that are ahead of the curve with SOA deployments -- but not at your average company.

Nevertheless, the trends cited in the survey show what many companies will eventually be coming up against as they build out SOA. And one issue that stands out is that these companies report they can't find SOA skills.

Currently, the IBM survey shows, half the respondents said they have less than 25 percent of the necessary SOA skills to help their company meet long-term goals. A combination of business and IT skills was cited by 68 percent of the respondents as prerequisite to applying SOA to meet business goals.

In addition, the survey also found that 40 percent of respondents spend between 10 and 30 percent of overall IT budgets on SOA projects. Most respondents say they have increased their SOA budgets over last year.

But, remember, these are the believers.