After all, SOA is by definition an architecture as well as an approach to IT that can help solve immediate business challenges.

Though each company has different business needs and each industry faces its own set of challenges, there are common issues that can lead to the failure of an SOA. The 10 most prevalent are:

• Secure executive sponsorship: Before presenting how you'll ensure your company's SOA success, be prepared to demonstrate successes and failures of other companies on their path to SOA and articulate how you'll emulate proven practices and avoid pitfalls.
• Align the troops: Converse to overcoming the obstacle of executive support for your SOA is the challenge of aligning your organization to work and think in new ways. To do this, identify and recruit critical champions for each part of the business who will support and even evangelize the SOA efforts.
• Consolidate views: Eliminate the multiple views of information that are currently floating across your organization so you are only looking at a singular, comprehensive and consistent view of the business.
• Reuse: Identify and maintain a repository of your current Web services to avoid duplication of efforts. You may be surprised how much work has already been done by different pockets of your organization.
• Integrate the silos: Though in theory many of today's IT organizations seek to integrate and avoid redundancies while maximizing their current IT investments, the reality is that extraordinary efforts are being spent on still trying to maintain different IT systems that co-exist but are not integrated. The penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to SOA simply does not work.
• Seeing the forest through the trees: Remember that SOA is an architecture. It's not a combination of clumsily bundled together point products that need to be force fit. A true SOA is created with an open standards-based approach through four strategic stages: model, assemble, deploy and manage.
• Hop on the enterprise service bus (ESB): An ESB provides the much-needed connectivity infrastructure you can use to integrate services within an SOA. Together, an SOA and ESB help to reduce the number of complexity of interfaces. This can enable you to focus on your core business issues rather than on maintaining your IT infrastructure.
• Step by step: When the thought of rolling out an enterprise-wide SOA becomes overwhelming, remember that the best approach is to continually test and modify to identify issues while adding to your arsenal of best practices along the way.
• Avoid the 'carpe diem' approach: Remember that you're not building your SOA just for today or this year. This is an organization-wide approach to aligning IT with the needs of the business. It must accommodate today's needs as well as those of the future. For example, be sure to include support for mobile and wireless devices as well as ensuring you have enough flexibility to support the "next big thing".
• Prevent the accidental SOA: Many organizations may discover they have a healthy repository of Web services that will comprise the majority of their SOA. Still, they don't believe the SOA starts and ends with a collection of Web services. Remember that an SOA must go beyond Web services to support all your business processes. It must also provide a flexible, extensible and composable approach to reusing and extending existing applications and services as well as constructing new ones.

If you've been hesitant to initiate an SOA project this year, make it your New Year's resolution to better align your technology with the needs of the business and join the legions of developers driving revenue up and cost out of their companies.

Follow these 10 steps and you'll be on your way to success.

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