Sometimes, of course, the ultimate reality never matches the original hype. Voice recognition? ("I want a flight to Boston." "Houston?" "No, Boston." "Not Boston?" "Yes, Boston!" "Please hold.")

Artificial intelligence?

Still not so smart.

Service-oriented architecture?

Right now we seem to be passing out of the hype phase ("You gotta do it now! It’ll cut your development costs and guarantee IT-business alignment forever!") and entering the disillusionment phase. Building an SOA, as we learn in "The Four Stages of Enterprise Architecture," entails a long, drawn-out process that, according to two MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research studies—"IT Architecture as Strategy" and "IT-Driven Strategic Choices"—upon which the article is based, can take decades, according to Jeanne W. Ross, the studies’ principal research scientist.

There are lots of reasons why it will take so long. Before you can even begin thinking about encapsulating your company’s business processes in reusable services, you’ve first got to integrate all your various data silos (that’s Stage 1). Then you have to promulgate standard IT platforms across the enterprise (Stage 2). Then you have to optimize your IT and your business processes (Stage 3). And then, finally, you’re ready to begin figuring out which of these optimized processes can be expressed in technology and made available to the business users (Stage 4).

And what finally happens in Stage 4? Something a wee bit scary. In Stage 4, "the lines between IT and the business are blurring," says David Saul, senior VP and head of the Office of Architecture at State Street, "and it’s clear that someone will have to manage both." And that may put in jeopardy the careers of many CIOs who don’t have the firm handle on the business we’d all like. (You know who you are.)