There is uniform agreement that SOA holds great promise as a strategy for improving business agility, better aligning IT and the business, and increasing overall IT efficiency. And developing an SOA strategy has become a key issue for most large enterprises: CTOs in a 2007 McKinsey survey ranked SOA as their top strategic item.

 Yet despite this, organizations struggle with how to start the transformation to SOA, especially in assessing their business readiness. For every organization that successfully adopts SOA and can testify to its benefits, there are others whose SOA initiatives have failed to deliver sustained business value, or have stalled. What does it really take to be successful with SOA? What are the technical, organizational and business challenges? What do successful SOA adopters do differently?