Although the weather wasn’t the best for last Thursday’s 2007 MIT CIO Symposium the attendence didn’t seem to suffer. There were probably 500 to 600 people attending. The sight that sticks in my mind was seeing everybody bundled up trying to keep warm under the tent where lunch was served. Fortunately it was a bit warmer inside the exhibit hall, although not much warmer. Welcome to May in New England!

The buzz around the conference seemed to be Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Everybody was talking about it. What I realized is depending who you were talking with it meant something different. For the technologist it’s about enabling technologies like virtualization. For the managers it’s about processes like ITIL. In the end you’ll need both perspectives for SOA to become a success.

I think the key take away from my standpoint came from the keynote speaker, Charlie Feld. Charlie is the EVP of Application Services at EDS. Charlie observed that in order for organizations to succeed with SOA a new management approach will be needed. Existing management tools aren’t sufficient for a service oriented infrastructure. Charlie also observed that SOA will be an evolutionary thing. The “big bang” approach is just too hard, organizations will instead evolve towards SOA.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Industry News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.