It would appear that SOA is coming down off the hype cycle after a few years as the preminent buzzword. CIO magazine has a cover story on The Truth About SOA.
CIOs need to pursue an SOA strategy carefully because the service development and architecture planning pieces of SOA are distinct but not independent—they need to be considered and executed in parallel. Services built in isolation, without taking into account the architectural and business goals of the company, may have little potential for reuse (one of SOA’s most important benefits) or may fail outright. Grand architectural planning exercises may drag on endlessly, without providing any real business benefit.
It’s nice to see a fairly conservative IT magazine like CIO mention that the big up front SOA design isn’t likely to work. We’re still grappling with SOA ourselves as an organization. There’s been a lot of hype, a good bit of grand design, and as of yet only one web service in production. At the end of the day with product owners really involved in Scrum projects, they’re not willing to compromise all the effort involved to use an SOA style architecture on their application.