Some are even more dubious. "Companies are creating a complex bureaucracy around something that 90 percent of the time is overkill," says Thomas Gagn¿CTO of InStream Financial, a software and financial services vendor. "Why are we replacing technology and obsolescing our employees’ skills faster than we’re realizing the benefits of the previous, now supposedly inadequate technologies?"

That’s a difficult question CIOs need to ask themselves before entering SOA’s business transformation revival tent. Here are a few more:

The Questions, The Answers

Q: SOA is a technology architecture. How do you make a business case for a new technology architecture?

A: You don’t. "Don’t talk to the business about SOA because the business doesn’t care," says Forrester Research analyst Randy Heffner. The business’s interest in SOA extends only as far as it cuts the cost of applications and gets them running faster. But simply rewriting code in the form of a service doesn’t deliver those kinds of benefits. To start down the road to building an SOA, there needs to be multiple redundant IT applications that can be consolidated into a single service, or the possibility for multiple areas of the business to use a single service. To speak to the business, quantifying the redundancy helps. "I know for a fact that the same data is being extracted by at least 26 different applications in our environment for different purposes," says Jeff Gleason, director of IT strategies for Transamerica Life Insurance, annuity products and services division. "We’re extracting it and paying to store it in all those different places. Just getting rid of those support costs is a big deal."

But there is also a flexibility quotient to SOA that can add value—if it is focused on a critical business process. At ProFlowers.com, for example, there are no redundant applications or multiple business units clamoring for services. But splitting the flower ordering process into discrete services means each component can be isolated and changed as needed to handle the spikes in demand that occur around holidays, according to ProFlowers CIO Kevin Hall. When ProFlowers had a single, monolithic application handling the process, a single change in the process or a growth in transaction volume (on, say, Valentine’s Day) meant tearing apart the entire system and rebuilding it.

In the new system, a server farm responds to spikes in activity during each phase of the ordering process by transferring storage capacity to the specific service that needs it most. The system is much more predictable now, and there have been no outages since the service-enabled process was rolled out beginning in 2002, according to Hall. "Because we can scale horizontally [more servers] and vertically [splitting up services], I don’t have to buy all the hardware to serve every service at its peak load," he says. "You don’t have to be able to eat the elephant in one bite anymore."