Michael Liebow is the vice president of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) for IBM Business Consulting Services. He helped build IBM's SOA consulting practice and has spent the past three years directly involved with IT and business customers working on Web services/SOA projects. With IBM focusing on the business aspects of SOA, we recently asked him for a snapshot where business people stand now.

Michael Liebow: The dynamics are shifting in the marketplace. The large mega-projects are getting sized much smaller. In that way you don't need to go to the board for approval. The line of business manager is making the purchase decision. He's sizing the purchase smaller so he doesn't have to take it up the chain of command and he's trying to move faster. So we are trying to lay out a strategy for how you incrementally build SOA. We've announced a service offering. We have a strategy offering. We have an incremental planning offering. We have diagnostics to tell you where you are and where you are not right now. Where are you relative to your technology? Where are you relative to the business processes?