Q: How will SOA affect my IT group?

A: If you have a decentralized company, be prepared for a struggle. SOA drives centralization. Indeed, it demands it. "You have to have someone heading it up, and you have to have one individual or small team manage the architecture," says Mike Falls, senior system engineer for Fastenal, an industrial and construction supply company. "If each team is left to itself, they may each come up with different ways of building services. You need one group, one set of research and someone to make sure the development groups are sticking to the service development methodology."

As the service portfolio grows, the development process may begin to look like an assembly line. "It becomes a factory," says AEP's Wissner. "You have these different project teams that you funnel work through, and they can grow and shrink as required."

Once the SOA factory gets ramped up, expect to add more project managers, business analysts and architects as the productivity of the developers increases, says ProFlowers' Hall. "Two developers can now do the work of six," he says. "That means the architects and project managers are running to keep up with the output of the engineers. We are probably doing 50 percent more work than we did three years ago."

Those programmers need to understand object-oriented programming and distributed applications - and that means an investment in training. According to the CIO/Computerworld survey, only 25 percent of respondents have the staffs they need for SOA - 49 percent said they are planning or have training programs in place for current staff to bring them up to speed.

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Integrate 'Em

In the new SOA world, enterprise vendors suddenly are eager to make sure their application suites can play well with others.

In the 90s, your integration strategy was simple: Buy as many preintegrated applications from a single vendor as possible. That worked for you, and it worked extremely well for the vendor; integrated application suites fetched a high price and required long-term maintenance and support contracts that promised a steady, predictable stream of revenue from customers.

Even better, CIOs' fear of integration pain gave vendors a built-in sales advantage whenever a company wanted to add a new application to its stack. It was easier for the CIO to pick a preintegrated application from the dominant vendor than to take a risk on a best-of-breed newcomer - even if its application had better functionality - because expensive integration disasters had become the much-publicized bane of the industry. Better to have disappointed users, CIOs reasoned, than headlines in the business press.

But the rise of service-oriented architecture has produced a shift in integration strategy. SOA makes the radical assertion that the enterprise application infrastructure is irrelevant. Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business, not by processes contained within an enterprise application vendor's software box. In this scenario, packaged software is a piece of the service, just another component in a larger business process - such as an insurance claims process that links a jumble of functions and data inside ERP, CRM and old mainframe legacy systems. The application's vendor doesn't matter any more; the linkages between the applications are the important thing.

As a result, the vendors' integration strategies have become more important than the features of their software. (Both dominant enterprise software vendors, Oracle and SAP, have begun offering integration middleware to go along with their software suites, although both are sticking with the big, integrated software suite vision.)

In the brave new world of SOA, the big software vendors have decided to take a page from Microsoft's playbook and duplicate the Windows strategy. With the Windows operating system running on 95 percent of PCs, software developers are eager to create software that works with Windows because it means they can reach the most customers and make the most money. As a result, the thousands of applications available for Windows today ensure its dominance in the operating system market tomorrow. Similarly, the big enterprise software vendors are trying to ensure their futures in a SOA world by assembling ecosystems around their core applications.