Getting Down to the Business of SOAs

According to this InfoWorld article by David Margulius, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) may finally be putting IT where it belongs, at the same table at the same time as business planners. The article quotes IBM’s Sandy Carter, vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy: “Process is becoming that common vocabulary that exists between the business and IT.” Given the difficulty of establishing a common language between business and IT, this is a great start. But as the article goes on to suggest, bringing SOA technology and business processes together in a large enterprise will take time, patience, interdepartmental participation at the highest levels of the business, and overcoming resistance to change.  And without all that, the promise of this great evolution in technology may never be realized.