The final point to consider is how SOA adoption will impact the overall development methodologies employed throughout the IT organization. Among the key approaches currently being used is the Waterfall methodology, which operates under the premise that changes in development are expensive and disruptive. As such, each project and every application is architected to the "nth" degree to avoid such occurrences. Conversely, the Agile development model recognizes the impact of change, but also understands that it's frequently unavoidable. Therefore, a more modular approach is employed that limits the impact of any individual change, while allowing the organization to benefit from faster development times.

For organizations employing the Waterfall methodology, one of the key challenges that they'll face is that extensive, real-world testing is often delayed until the end of the development cycle. In the more dynamic environment enabled by an SOA, they run the risk of failing to keep pace with changes in key services. Therefore, by the time they're ready to test a particular solution, one of the underlying services may have changed in a number of fundamental ways, leaving the user with a composite application that fails to function as designed. At the same time, the broader shift toward faster development also challenges their ability to keep pace with these escalating demands due to the proclivity for deeper front-loaded design and document work inherent to this methodology.

However, Agile development shops face their own challenges. Principally, this "just-in-time" approach potentially inhibits long-term planning. As a result, reuse can be compromised as little opportunity is given to consider each service's broader, longer-term requirements. In addition, many Agile development organizations have difficulty creating and maintaining long-term documentation regarding applications and assets - a critical need for reuse of services between project teams. That said, their practice of iterative testing serves as a great complement to SOA because it helps to ensure interoperability by enforcing more consistent governance standards.

SOA Means Change - Accept It, Embrace It, and Profit from It
As an IT strategy, SOA offers great promise for helping to overcome some of the most systematic challenges facing IT, and a number of organizations are beginning to show real results. Of course, these benefits do not come without cost, and therefore you need to be prepared to change some existing approaches to accommodate this new strategy.

Arguably, one of the key benefits offered by SOA is the ability to experiment more broadly as feedback can now be more easily captured and incorporated into subsequent versions of a composite application and this entire process can now be rendered in hours or days as opposed to months thanks to SOA. You need to take a similar approach to managing, supporting, and staffing your SOA environment in which you're open to experimentation, but committed to testing to drive the emergence of best practices.

As evinced by such trends as offshore outsourcing, it's also important to note that existing competencies can quickly be commoditized. Regardless of their role, SOA provides IT professionals with the means with which to play a more strategic role within the enterprise, and more important, one in which their unique domain knowledge and understanding of core business processes cannot be easily replicate. This is probably the most important lesson to be learned regarding the transition to SOA, which is the need to develop an even deeper understanding of the business objectives in order to thrive in this environment.