Over the past several years, there has been much fanfare regarding the promise of SOA. However, as with any IT-related solution, it is not a magic bullet or cure-all for IT integration. In fact, SOA does not solve business process problems, but rather identifies both the good and bad organizational processes. In most instances, SOA will require additional front-loaded costs until a critical mass of services are developed for reuse. It will require organizational and even process changes that will demand high levels of training, funding, and organizational governance. Even with these challenges, adopting an SOA methodology is recommended.

Building a successful SOA Governance organization requires the attention to assets and capabilities across all service domains or high-level categories of services. Domains typically can focus on a major entity, e.g., customer or employee, the intersection of two entities, or smaller partitions like product pricing. SOAG is an extension of IT Governance, which focuses on the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable IT behavior.