I just recently had a simple article published in the digital edition of SOAWorld magazine titled "Navigating the SOA journey from project to productivity".  It's another back-to-basics piece.  With all the hooplah lately about whether the term SOA is dead or alive, we lose sight of the fact that regardless of terms, IT needs to embrace service orientation to transition from the silo'd applications state to a state of agile compositions... and service orientation is not just a technology dicussion.  It encompasses architecture, applications, organizations and best practices. 

 In the article, I describe the move to service orientation as a three-stage journey from getting started, to crossing the shared service divide to scaling to the enterprise.  I believe these tenents hold true whether the architecture is SOA or service oriented using web-oriented principles, mash-ups, cloud services or something else... 

 The article can be found here. 

 Here's a snippet: 

Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and so does a SOA. The best way to get started is to assess your organizational readiness for SOA, empower a team to own SOA adoption, identify a project with substantial business support, and start to implement services under the guidance of a governance program.