"Odds of Recession Seen Rising" was the Wall Street Journal headline for a survey of economic forecasters this past Friday. SearchSOA.com did its own survey of thought leaders who follow service-oriented architecture to see how they thought an economic downturn would impact SOA planning and implementation. Specifically, we asked this question: What will SOA need to achieve in an economic downturn to prove it deserves its agile-business, cost-savings hype?

Three key practices required
Neil Ward-Dutton, research director, Macehiter Ward-Dutton

The real question here is "what will people need to achieve with SOA?" and it's not just me being pedantic. Part of the challenge I've seen in many organizations which have struggled with SOA has come from them thinking that SOA would be something they could just buy, with benefits forthcoming.