We recently ran a poll to determine how "in the loop" the CIO is about Web services development efforts. We chose to ask about Web services because that's where SOA efforts usually start: at the grass roots of the organization, used to solve sticky integration issues that can't easily be solved by more traditional methods.The results were highly instructive. Only 21 percent of respondents said that the CIO was "fully informed" about Web services development efforts. An additional 34 percent said s/he had a "general" idea of what was going on. But a whopping 45 percent said that the CIO "hadn't a clue." That's a really poor showing.

True, it was better than the same poll that we had run a year earlier, in which 56 percent had poured scorn on the CIO for not knowing what was going on in his/her own organization, but 45 percent is still an unacceptable figure, especially since SOAs are supposedly becoming strategically essential to enterprises.

Which brings us to this week's main feature, appropriately titled the CIO Challenge. Not surprisingly, given our poll, the key challenge facing CIOs is communication. The article focuses mainly on the communications issues between the technology and business arms of an enterprise, but the issues it raises and the advice it offers could very well be applied to internal communications as well. Read away!

We also had a review of Logidex's LogicLibrary by the CRN Test Center. The Test Center's engineers believe that object orientation alone is not enough to create an agile enterprise that can reuse and maintain source code. After all, code discovery and cross-platform and environment manageability as well as reusability must play a key role in source management. This is especially critical with SOAs, which are a hodgepodge of reusable code. LogicLibrary passed all the tests with flying colors, offering a comprehensive solution for managing software assets and improving reusability. Its metadata repository can store COM components, Enterprise JavaBeanss, .Net components and legacy code. Check it out . . .it would be a valuable tool for any SOA development arsenal.

Finally, we had a news item about Sun Microsystems having finished its acquisition of SOA integration vendor SeeBeyond. SeeBeyond stockholders approved the acquisition and will receive $4.25 per share for an aggregate consideration of about $383 million. The SeeBeyond subsidiary will operate under Sun's software division, and technology from the acquired company is expected to enhance the value of the Java Enterprise System platform. Sun president Jonathan Schwartz calls the synergy between the two companies "remarkable," and says that SeeBeyond technology has already been integrated into Sun's core product portfolio. If so, that was fast work. We'll see how this plays out in terms of improvements in Sun's ability to deliver on its SOA integration promises.

That's all for this week. Have a good one.