When Defense Department officials envisioned a sleeker, more efficient information technology infrastructure to support warfighting efforts, they committed to a hot but still unproven strategy known as a service-oriented architecture. SOA promises an orderly world of flexible and interoperable software components that perform specific data-handling functions. Developers can also dynamically mix and match SOA-managed services to create new applications and processes. SOA is gaining support at a growing number of agencies, but it resonated early with DOD.

"We had a notion of transformation of our IT infrastructure for warfare," said Rob Vietmeyer, chief engineer for the Defense Information Systems Agency's Net-Centric Enterprise Services program. "We wanted to increase our agility and provide for data access and function sharing at a scale larger than ever. We wanted to view this from the full enterprise perspective."

Two years into its SOA efforts, DISA is now creating a digital directory so developers across DOD can locate Web services waiting to be plugged into new SOA applications. Although the SOA project is still in development and only some small pilot tests are being conducted so far, Vietmeyer said the early results are encouraging.