Service-oriented Architecture

In a recent survey, one-third of CIOs polled had a high-level architecture group. Of the remaining CIOs, one-third were planning to establish an architecture group in the next year or two. What role does architecture play in projects and strategic planning? Hear the perspective of an IT/enterprise architect as he talks about the practice and value of architecture. Learn about ITANA, a peer group where you can engage and learn more about architect as practiced in higher education.

Service oriented architecture is all the rage. Vendor products like registries, ESBs, XML gateways, and WSM promise "SOA in a box." But SOA is actually about process and culture. What's hype and what's reality? What can it do for you? Where do you start? The University of Washington will describe its nascent SOA initiative and lessons learned.

IT Architects in Academia (ITANA) focuses on the practice of IT and enterprise architecture (EA) in higher education. We will review various ways IT architecture is implemented on campuses and how people engage with the campus. Discussion will include hot topics such as service oriented architecture and EA challenges and incentives. We will also plan for future ITANA work. For more information, see our Web site (www.itana.org) and our wiki (https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/itana/Home).

It is time to think differently about administrative systems in colleges and universities. Using the Kuali Student Service System as an illustration, this ECAR research bulletin discusses a vision, and a set of functional and technical principles, for the next generation of administrative systems. Although the vision and principles are being developed for a new student system, they can serve as a framework for the development of an administrative system in any area of higher education. They are also a guide to what to look for in planning to select and implement a next generation vendor-supplied administrative system.

This session will review service oriented architecture from a number of perspectives We will define SOA, discuss its value to higher education, and present use cases on how it can enhance our scholarly and enterprise systems. Challenges in organizing for and implementing SOA will be highlighted including a discussion of using SOA in enterprise open source development as well as distributed environments.

SOA can provide a secure, reliable, and agile architecture that benefits the entire institution.

The international e-Framework for Education and Research is helping the research and education world take advantage of the opportunities offered by the service-oriented approach.

In this article, first published in 1999, the author looked to past trends in hardware, software, networking, and education, presciently extrapolated where these trends were going and what their broad implications might be for higher education, and predicted some still-to-be-realized models for the future.