SOA has gone from just another three-letter acronym to the Holy Grail for agility-seeking enterprises. A horde of vendors and consultants are pitching SOA stuff, from app dev tools to enterprise service buses. The SOA label has even wrapped itself around conventional software, from vertical telephony applications to monolithic ERP suites. Can the SOA mainframe be far behind?

Yet tools and applications, even those totally relevant to SOA, get you only so far. Any enterprise embarking on an SOA journey needs to know where it’s going and how to make the right preparations. Fortunately, SOA has been around long enough for some top-level best practices to emerge. And frameworks and maturity models from vendors and consultancies are beginning to crystallize.

So are the barriers and bottlenecks that thwart SOA efforts. Some are technical, but most are managerial — tough issues that will put IT in new, often uncomfortable roles that may test all participants’ faith in whether IT and business are truly aligned. In fact, last year an AMR Research survey of more than 1,000 companies revealed that organizational and management challenges were the principal reasons both IT and business respondents cited for not pursuing SOA.

The good news is that by understanding these barriers, you can plot a way around them. Or at least prepare yourself for the encounter.

Getting the concept
Selling the dream
Hammering out the architecture
Scoping out services
Timing the technology choice
Addressing the data problem
Governance, governance, governance
Changing developer culture
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Putting services to the test