For good reason SOA is being heralded as a major architectural shift that enables IT teams to reduce costs and improve responsiveness and flexibility - two key business objectives for CIOs today. With SOA, IT ultimately becomes a service provider to the business itself - delivering infrastructure, applications, and processes as services throughout a company.

SOA certainly offers promise; but at the same time, successfully navigating the people, process, and technology changes associated with it can be risky. Of course, companies want to reduce this risk. According to Gartner a successful SOA program "necessitates new processes, ranging from governance, through development, to operations." SOA deployments require a commitment to planning and strategy, but the entire adoption process can be streamlined if the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is already in place. In fact, companies that adhere to ITIL best practices prior to implementation will minimize many common issues, such as the complexity of change management, in an SOA deployment because of the rigor and discipline of their ITIL experience.