The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), which represents the chief information officers (CIOs) released its research brief, "Service Oriented Architecture: an Enabler of the Agile Enterprise." The brief identifies what state CIOs need to know now regarding Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), including its business value, the vision for SOA, SOA governance, SOA as a program and SOA security.

This research brief, an important resource for CIOs and state chief architects, also provides an excellent overview of SOA for non-technical government professionals at all levels of government. SOA promises to be a significant innovation for state government that will provide the ability to pick and choose business and technology services, and will allow the trade out of services based on organizational re-design, new strategic intent, legislative requirements, or business process modifications.

"SOA promises to bring significant business value out of existing IT assets through increased operational efficiencies, optimized business processes, and the ability to adapt and change quickly," said Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher. "Providing flexible access to information across platforms and languages can be complex and resource intensive. Service Oriented Architecture simplifies this through standard protocols which treat all platforms equally. This allows us to offer data services to a wide variety of business partners with requests that can originate from anywhere."

SOA is not another new technology but rather a whole philosophy about sharing and decoupling business processes from technology to enable a fluid enterprise that can adapt and change quickly. With SOA, the spontaneous enterprise, a long-touted vision within enterprise architecture, now becomes possible. KW