IT skills in an SOA world

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Is a shortage of specialist skills hampering your organisation's progress as it moves towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA)?

If so, you're not alone. In the ninth annual Skills Survey recently conducted by online IT news site silicon.com, almost half (48 per cent) of respondents agreed that the UK IT skills shortage had reached crisis point, and 45 per cent said there are IT jobs in their business that they are unable to fill.

Among the resources that are hardest to find, said respondents, are experience in web services and J2EE/.Net programming skills - both vital to a smooth and successful SOA project.

Another problem - and a potentially far larger one -- is that SOA specialists need a combination of both technical and business abilities, according to many IT market analysts. The preferred educational background for IT employees today is more often an MBA than a computer science degree, they say, and new IT hires are as likely to be brought over from the business side as they are to have been groomed in IT.

That's because SOA demands that applications are developed as modular business services, requiring an in-depth understanding of the process steps or activities that make up an end-to-end business process, such as order-to-cash.

Even some programming jobs ‑ once purely technical positions ‑ now require candidates to spend time working in the business function first before ever designing systems for that function.

But since SOA will increasingly be key to business agility and competitiveness, this issue must be tackled, says Chris Gabriel, head of solutions at Logicalis. "Whether you train people up internally or get outside help - or both - you need to be thinking about establishing a team that both understands business processes and can engineer them effectively. The gap between IT and the business is an anomaly in the world of SOA and it needs to be bridged as a matter of urgency," he says.

Your Comments and Questions

George Black, about 1 year ago

I'm not sure that the gap between business and IT is limited to SOA. For a few years now, there has been a broad consensus (in the press at least) that IT professionals are now much more attuned to the business needs of the organisation, and we've seen CIOs and IT Directors take up places on the board as a result. Is this the case or, like SOA, is there still a general gap between IT and the requirements of the business?