Meeting on Center of Excellence - Extracts

Source: http://www.soa-consortium.org/podcasts-webcasts/podcast-DC2008-coe.htm
Center of Excellence: Speakers and Roundtable / SOA Consortium Meeting, March 13, 2008
The 3 panelists - Bruce Henderson of Savant, David Butler of HP, Richard Reba of CSC, and Melvin Greer of Lockheed Martin - were asked to answer 4 questions in respect to SOA Center of Excellence.

1. The first is what are the three most critical skills that you should staff in your SOA COE?
2. The second is where do those skills come from?
3. How do you develop those skills or find those skills on the street?
4. And then what is any skill that they often see in the Center of Excellence that really just does not belong there?

Some interesting answers:

• Vision, Politics/Business/Management, Communication
• Business, technology, and management skills, first of all.
• Foresight, Innovation, Leadership - "True leadership is when the rest of the organization does not necessarily report to you, yet you are able to influence change within the organization anyway. So that combination is very important..."
• Passion, "people people", tenacity - "...You have got to hang on through some very challenging times..."
• Entrepreneurial ability
• "...you need people who are familiar with the culture and the way that the organization works..."
• "...You have to have somebody who is actually a practitioner if you want to build a competency center."
• "...The most important one that we find very difficult to get people to do it is design for reuse. Design for reuse simply means being able to build something today that is coarse-grained enough that somebody else can easily pick it up and use it, but actually deliver some technical functionality that is tied to a business process."
• "Now the thing that I do not necessarily want in my competency center, that I struggle sometimes with, is vendor representation. I love our vendor partners because they provide us tools, and they provide us insight, and they help us understand capabilities. But what I am finding is that they want to hijack my competency center."