Government IT leaders are faced with a multitude of challenges to achieve IT agility that leads to business agility. Many are turning to or considering Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help meet this challenge.

Info-Tech Research Group ran a survey in the spring of 2007. The presentation explores the results of the survey as it applies to governments and how government compares to other industries. In all it covers:

• The nature of SOA initiatives.
• Who is doing SOA, why, what stages they are in.
• How an SOA initiative compares in budget to other initiatives.
• How formal the SOA initiative is.
• Use of formal project plans, budgets, metrics, and business cases.
• How the initiative is being run.
• Project sponsorship, definition.
• Length of project and anticipated benefit timeline.
• Structure of SOA initiatives.
• Inclusion of service repositories, business process analysis tools, business process management suites, enterprise service bus (ESB).
• Inclusion of SOA governance aspects.
• Focus on business processes.
  

Maximize the likelihood of success with SOA by learning from the experiences of colleagues in the same industry, as well as in others.