Lost sometimes in the technical discussions of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the human factor.

In a roundtable on governance sponsored by the OMG's SOA Consortium, Fill Bowen, SOA governance marketing manager at IBM, raised an issue not heard very often when he asserted that some IT professionals believe SOA threatens their jobs.

"A lot of concerns we've seen is in development organizations and in IT shops is -- is their job going to go away when we move to SOA," he said in the roundtable podcast recently released by the consortium. "So a lot of discussions early on when you're putting your governance in place is to say, okay, your job is not going away. It may change, but it's not going to away. This is not an effort -- we've had some companies that said, you know, going to SOA is a way to downsize. That is not the intent of SOA. It's not intended to downsize your IT shops. It's intended to make your business more productive."