SOA Consortium announced that a podcast and slide deck of the presentation by Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM, on "IT needs SOA Skills," at the SOA Consortium meeting in San Francisco in December is now available. To access the podcast, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcast-ca-sc-pr.

Sandy Carter spoke about the importance of fostering SOA skills in her presentation to the members and guests attending the SOA Consortium general meeting in December. In her presentation, she called out results from a survey conducted at IBM's Impact conference that "56% of people say their biggest inhibitor is not looking at the value of SOA, or what SOA brings to the table, but it was looking at their skills."

In respect to SOA skills, Sandy shared that the most critical, and most scarce, is the combination of technical and business skills. IBM has learned that the most successful SOA initiatives have individuals who can determine what process to start with, articulate that process, identify the most competitive part, make the translation to services and communicate with both the business and IT.

After sharing IBM's work on SOA skills development - including demonstrations of Innov8 and a Key Agility Indicator Benchmark Wizard - Sandy spoke about how the SOA Consortium can help colleges and companies understand and create the SOA skills needed for the future.

To hear all of the insights Sandy presented, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcast-ca-sc-pr to download the 45-minute podcast and accompanying slide presentation.