SOA talent and big consultancies

There is a meme I keep running into these days about SOA, its adoption and how it relates to consultancies.. big or small. David Linthicum has a podcast on how to choose an SOA consultancy and he lays out some common sense advice on how to pick a good consultancy. He also backs it up with an post alluding to an article which suggests

56% respondents say a lack of SOA skills is “the #1 Inhibitor” to launching and delivering SOA projects with strong business impact

About half of all respondents admit they have less than 25% of SOA skills they deem necessary to meet long term goals

80% of respondents will invest to increase SOA skills in their company this year

More than 60% of corporate executives invested in SOA-targeted retraining for both IT and Business staffs in the past year

Well IMHO that survey seems to have been worded incorrectly. For starters I dont believe retraining is required for visualizing an SOA!! All it needs is experience which is in abundance if anyone cared to look at failed EAI efforts in the past. I believe what the survey wanted to say was lack of tools/ technology skills to “IMPLEMENT” a service oriented vision!

Like Linthicum says  to paraphrase (emphasis mine),

Invest in collaborate with the business stakeholder, analyze and create requirements and pick a solution that apropriately satisfies your need. Then pick a vendor who can implement the solution.

As Anne puts it succinctly

Steve is, of course, speaking as an employee of a big consultancy.
Nonetheless, I agree with him. Partnering with a consultancy that has
partnerships with *many* vendors is a better idea than partnering with
a consultancy that has *few* vendor partnerships.