There have been countless many articles focused on establishing a business case for service-oriented architecture (SOA), developing a prospective Return on Investment (ROI), and proving to the business why SOA will provide short-term benefits, address pressing problems, and provide a long-lived answer to the persistent problems of IT's ability to meet the changing needs of the business. However, with all this business goodness, you would think that SOA investment would go unimpeded. After all, if SOA can prove its value to the folks who hold the pocketbooks, then why aren't we seeing unfettered SOA spending reminiscent of the dot.com-boom days when the promise of IT was as great as what SOA promises now?

Part of the reason for SOA's continued measured uptake is that SOA is all about architecture, and doing architecture well is really hard. Despite how some vendors may portray it, you can't just buy a product and expect it to miraculously create the services you need and the agile architecture and organization to support them. At best, you can get the tools and infrastructure needed to create those services. On the contrary, experience has shown that successful SOA adoption requires companies to spend more time changing the way they do IT more so than just the technology they use to implement their short-term needs.