SOA and Web 2.0 go to school 28 February 2007
Posted by soachief in SOA Training, Web 2.0.add a comment
As more and more enterprises adopt the SOA paradigm and begin to employ the use of Web2.0 technologies, they are going to need associates with tmore and more sophisticated skills. There are a plethora of SOA and Web 2.0 training venues today, however there are no classroom curricula being offered, until now.
SOA in the classroom
IBM is partnering with Georgetown University to offer an SOA college curricula. Experience and knowledge of the SOA approach is a valuable asset for professionals and students that want to enhance their marketable IT industry skills while also honing business acumen.
As the nation’s first collaborative SOA Curricula for IT professionals and academics, the programs will provide IT professionals with an intensive, three day workshop that focuses on real world SOA skills that can be immediately used in the workplace. For students, the SOA Curricula will provide an opportunity to take courses as part of a Computer Science major to learn the basics of SOA while earning credits and gaining additional, immediately employable IT skills upon graduation.
Additional academic partners that are helping design the SOA Curricula include Dr. Paul Buhler from the College of Charleston’s Department of Computer Science and Drs. Arun Sood and Alexander Levis from George Mason University.
The SOA Curricula is expected to start in the spring 2007 semester and will include courses covering both IT and business skills to help support participants’ career goals. Additionally, speakers from real-world SOA implementations will share experiences and students will tackle hands-on assignments using the leading SOA tools and techniques.
Web2.0 in the classroom
IBM has also teamed with the University of Arizona to offer Web 2.0 technologies as part of a classroom curricula to the MIS (management information systems department) and marketing students at The Eller College of Management. The program hopes to equip students with skills in the creation and management of online communities and social network systems.
The new course is aimed at reinvigorating undergraduate interest in IT by appealing to the "MySpace Generation"—those considered familiar with online communities.
The goal is to introduce some level of education where students get an understanding of the tools—those from wikis, those for blogging—and familiarize themselves. How do you start these communities? What do you need to plan?
Student interest in computer science majors has been on the decline since the dot com bust earlier in the decade, and reports and studies have warned of a looming shortage in technology-skilled workers.
The growing use of social and community technologies has led to an increased demand for the job role of a "community manager," according to IBM, and it’s a position that could be filled by an IT-skilled professional or someone who works in marketing.
This is a job that’s in-between marketing and IT support. You could be a technical developer or technical lead, or even a senior architect on the IT side. While it’s not a technically intensive job, it can be an excellent leadership role.
The new course will cover the role of online communities in business, the common types of community tools and environments, as well as how to launch, populate and grow communities.
The new course will be supported by IBM’s Academic Initiative program, which provides technology education benefits at a number of universities to encourage the use of open standards technology.
CBDI and FEAC tag-team on SOA certification 23 February 2007
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Everware-CBDI, the parent to the CBDI Forum, and the FEAC Institute announced the creation of a partnership to deliver EA and SOA training based on the CBDI SOA methods and the FEAC Institute’s comprehensive EA educational programs to government and commercial architects.
Felix Rausch, Director of FEAC stated: "Everware-CBDI’s SOA training is a natural complement to the FEAC EA short courses and the certification program that has trained and certified 500+ enterprise architects over the past five years. We welcome Everware-CBDI as a partner in expanding the depth and breadth of the FEAC offerings."
In this year of SOA training, this is the publicly available first Enterprise SOA (ESOA) certification program developed. There are several of SOA training venues ranging from internally developed curriculums to vendor specific training, even universities are beginning to offer SOA targeted courses. However, many are too focused on SOA at the enterprise level, but rather a focused more on the tools and ecosystem level aspects.
2007 the year of SOA training 9 February 2007
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Many organizations, both large and small, have begun their SOA journey. Although you have organizations who have had the foresight and desire to swift their orientation, who have begun to think integration and participation first, who have been developing loosely coupled service components and exposing those with service interfaces, there seems to be a major piece missing which is appropriately trained enterprise architects and engineers.
Granted SOA incorporates established engineering practices and principles, which should allow IT organizations to be more efficient, but does the SOA team posses the right visionaries who can implement it properly? Formal SOA training is still fairly new to the industry, however there are a few companies that offer training courses. My fellow SOA Chief, and good friend, Miko Matsumura, VP of SOA at webMethods, sees 2007 being the year that profession SOA training ramp ups really take off. I’m starting to see evidence of this from several new training offers for vendors, and current training offering being updated and expanded. For example, the Open Group plans to offer an Enterprise Architecture certification program. My friends over at Zapthink, Ron Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg, have partnered with a recruiting company to help identify qualified Enterprise Architects. The new SOA Master Class online community is really built around education and knowledge transfer.
Training initiatives such as the one over at ebizQ and the CBDI forum are being updated constantly with the SOAInAction Initiative and the Everware-CBDI training workshops respectively. Software vendors are all getting into the training game, like IBM and BEA. IBM is working with Georgetown University to develop an SOA bootcamp curriculum, which is scheduled to begin to be commencement this fall. Universities such as George Washington are looking to begin incorporating SOA and other related courses into their curriculums. While major universities, such as Arizona State, may not have SOA as part of their current curriculum professors and officials at these schools are bringing the need to the attention of their board of directors, or regents.
I myself have been involved in several SOA training efforts in the past 9 months for the organization that currently employees my services as well as external efforts. So I’ve seen first hand the newly found emphasis people are putting on formal SOA training and certification. So I would have to agree with Miko, in saying the 2007 will be the year for formal SOA training and certification.
SOA Masters hold session 8 February 2007
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A new online community is emerging intended to assist the masses in achieving SOA mastery. A few SOA Masters, like Ron Schmelzer, Dave Linthicum, Miko Matsumura, and or course the SOA Chief, provide their thoughts and commentary. The community offers insight to help people along their SOA journey and towards SOA mastery. On the site, SOA Master Class Online also offers free education materials such as courses, podcasts, research papers, white papers, and many other free materials to help people become educated and get one step closer to SOA mastery. So I encourage you to check it out and register!
