Hmm... Yes, but given that SOA today often implies Web Services, XML (or other) in addition to existing component technology infrastructures, isn't it true that SOA thinking also involves "layers and layers" of technology... just organized in a more organic fashion that traditional "layered" architecture might achieve?

I too have been trying to get a handle on what you mean by this re-orientation. I think it has to do with abstraction layers and thinking about services as connected interfaces that are stable, but then I fall into trap of others who say it's just thinking about everything as a service and I end up with JBOWS which doesn't seem right.

So, as I contemplate further, I think it has more to do with understanding the business, who is willing to "own" the service and how the business determines if they "use" what others own or they need their own functionality. This means SOA is more about organization, ownership, perhaps politics, and encapsulation of function, than it does about service decomposition, which is where I believe traditional architects like to take architecture. I'd be interested in your elaborations on how we do reorient our brain.

I agree with the sentiment and key conclusions i.e.
- SOA is a core aspect of EA (and EAs that get this will get SOA more quickly)
- SOA does have new some challenges especially around lifecycles, service quality management and inter-party agreements - but think that in but in many cases the challenges have always been there - now it is just harder to bury your mistakes.

I disagree with the some of the things implied i.e.
- Good EA has always been about interoperability (driven by business goals such as agility) - and never about layers of technology. So this is not something new with SOA.
- "Traditional enterprise architecture" is Technology Architecture (NOT EA). Many of frameworks, methods and tools - have been manifestly unsuited to real EA for a decade (hence the how few really success EA projects there are). So this is not something new with SOA either

Dave -

You may be on to something here. We are all "victims" of our past successes And our prior behavior patterns have resulted in 30+ years of complexity which is hard to overcome.

So it stands to reason that SOA is challenging for mainstream architects.

What will change?

The architects aren't going anywhere.

Or do we all wait for the slow conversion while the JBOWS and the tool centric approaches you have described (but not advocated) for the past year continue to move slowly along?

- Bob Eve
Composite Software