A way to enforce the SOA principle of reuse is to have a review board that evaluates new applications to ensure they are really needed. Sony Pictures and TrueCredit both use such a board. The review board should include the CIO or CTO, chief architect, key technology and process experts from IT, and key business analysts, says IDC’s Rogers.

Challenge 3: Rethink Your Talent Pool

In addition to architecture staff that develop and manage the SOA’s big picture, the CIO will need a development staff that is comfortable with both business processes and the services approach to developing applications. And business experts who can partner with IT on process identification and implementation are also critical—the CIO’s organization can’t do it all.

"Retraining, hiring and redeploying are all needed," says Rogers, so most CIOs will bring in some key hires experienced with SOA and retrain the existing staff in SOA-oriented thinking. "It’s an ongoing process, so start out small and do a lot of retraining," says TrueCredit’s Metzger.

Challenge 4: Apply SOA Principles to Your Data Too

Often overlooked in initial SOA efforts is the importance of treating data—not just application functionality—as a service, says ZapThink’s Schmelzer. In an SOA, multiple services residing in multiple applications might combine to execute a business process. If each service uses different data sources, or even the same data source in different ways, the results might not be what you expect, he says.

For example, Metzger enforces strict separation between services that access and store data and those that act on the data, such as performing calculations. He also keeps presentation services—those that format the data for the user or for reports—separate from other services. This helps ensure that all services have the same context for a specific piece of data.

The Payoff: Real Business-IT Alignment

All of these challenges underscore how different SOA is from traditional enterprise technology efforts. The CIO must put the technologist hat to the side and become an advocate for business processes. Better knowledge of those processes leads to better technology design, which reduces the cost of maintaining existing systems—something that now accounts for 70 percent to

80 percent of IT budgets, says Schmelzer.

"We’ve been talking for years about IT-business alignment," says IDC’s Rogers. An SOA lets you actually achieve that goal—if you can develop the architectural vision and execute on it over the long term. The process is not easy, but early adopters like Peck, Metzger and Stubbs would never go back to the traditional IT approach. "A lot of [D.C.] government would not work without SOA," says Peck.