In response to my building a business-driven architect blogroll post, James asked:

"So, what is the first question that we should collectively tackle?"

I was thrilled to see this.  As I've stated previously, an open exchange of information and ideas will strengthen all of our work, and in some (lofty) perfect world, the practice of architecture in the enterprise. 

That said.  I'd like to offer to serve as host/facilitator of community discussions/projects to tackle business-driven architecture related questions.  To start, all we need is a question of interest to the community, a blog post, and the use of comments and trackbacks to keep the discussion alive.

As our discussion gels into ideas/practices/whatever that we decide to share more formally, I'd be happy to play the role of editor, and release a business-driven architect community artifact/document under a creative commons license.  I'm thinking creative commons attribution-sharealike - but welcome other ideas.  As for distribution, I  imagine a community friendly site such as ebizQ would publish our work.  In some cases, a donation to the forthcoming SOA Alliance might be appropriate.  More on that as I learn about it. 

Because we are architects, and plan forward, if we outgrow the blog based approach, we can look into a Wiki or other collaboration methods.  However, because we are 'business-driven architects', I think starting as simply as possible, is best.

If you are interested, let me know through comments here, or email:  bda at elementallinks dot com.  Same if you have a question.

The first submitted question comes from MarkG:

So one question I would love to hear discussion on is how to prepare your IT organization for Service Orientation. I am curious to see how others are approaching this or not approaching it. I do see it as a challenge for your typical corporate IT shops as oppose to software vendors. What do you think? Is this a big issue for your shops? My gut feeling says that IT shops that have a well established EAI practice or maybe have successfully embraced OO design will have the right mixed of governance and discipline to have a run at SOA. Is this something worth discussing/addressing? Is everyone even looking at SOA now that the hype is at fever pitch?