I am seeing a disconnect between many clients’ 2008 plans for
service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the expectations they are
setting with the business groups that are funding them.

The good news is that people have been pervasive in getting
sponsorship and funding for SOA projects based on anticipated business
benefits. The bad news is that despite good technology, many IT
projects fail when business group don’t get what they think they were
promised. It’s like the old saying “you can talk the talk, but can you
walk the walk?”

The promise of SOA is to establish reusable services that can be
deployed throughout the enterprise to deliver accelerated application
implementation at lower risk and effort. Reusable business services
reduce redundant or overlapping development efforts and increase IT
productivity. They also enable applications that were previously siloed
to exchange data and interoperate.

>>> Continue to the rest of Your 2008 Data Integration Plans, Part 4:Getting your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in Order