Q: I can’t afford to build a million different services. How do I know which services will provide the most value for my investment?

A: When in doubt, start with processes that involve customers, directly affect revenue and address a specific pain point in the business. A 2006 survey by the Business Performance Management Institute found evolving customer needs and preferences to be the top driver in business process change or the introduction of new applications, followed by competitive threats and new revenue opportunities. (Cost savings was a distant fourth.) "Externally facing applications are the ones that provide the most business value, and they have a good set of change requirements that come up very often," says Gartner’s Sholler. "If you can improve those applications by 10 percent, it’s better than improving lower-level applications by 50 percent." Of course, adds Sholler, SOA may not provide more value than, say, a good packaged application. "But if it’s something you would have to build yourself anyway, you need to do it service-oriented," he says.

Q: How will SOA affect my IT group?

A: If you have a decentralized company, be prepared for a struggle. SOA drives centralization. Indeed, it demands it. "You have to have someone heading it up, and you have to have one individual or small team manage the architecture," says Mike Falls, senior system engineer for Fastenal, an industrial and construction supply company. "If each team is left to itself, they may each come up with different ways of building services. You need one group, one set of research and someone to make sure the development groups are sticking to the service development methodology."

As the service portfolio grows, the development process may begin to look like an assembly line. "It becomes a factory," says AEP’s Wissner. "You have these different project teams that you funnel work through, and they can grow and shrink as required."

Once the SOA factory gets ramped up, expect to add more project managers, business analysts and architects as the productivity of the developers increases, says ProFlowers’ Hall. "Two developers can now do the work of six," he says. "That means the architects and project managers are running to keep up with the output of the engineers. We are probably doing 50 percent more work than we did three years ago."

Those programmers need to understand object-oriented programming and distributed applications—and that means an investment in training. According to the CIO/Computerworld survey, only 25 percent of respondents have the staffs they need for SOA—49 percent said they are planning or have training programs in place for current staff to bring them up to speed.