The move from mainframes to the departmental minicomputers to the desktop personal computers, the emergence of networking as the solution to distributed computing, the advent of databases and client server architectures—all these and more have threatened to change the way CEOs think and take action with respect to information technology. None more so than today's great white hope—Service Oriented Architecture or SOA.

An interesting point of departure from the earlier paradigm shifts is that while most of the earlier developments happened because of the availability of the right technology at that point in time, SOA in some ways contradicts this paradigm because it is more of a business-driven architectural concept rather than an IT-driven technical fad.

It's a new way of thinking on how you look at your business in the short term/long term, what the key business functionalities are, how you see them growing and evolving in the coming years, and how you can leverage them across the organisation in a technology-neutral way.