Perhaps this issue needs to be looked at from different angle. I am consulting for a Fortune 10 company, which has a minimal reuse, not because of unawareness of benefits of reuse, but because of organizational silos created by inter-team competition and lack of collaborative culture. Besuiness requirements portfolio exist at strategic level, but does not exist at tactical and operational level; resulting in minimal reuse or commonality.

Further the concept of "information management" as an integral part of SOA, is being recognized, but competitive work culture and showman-ship takes precedence over collaboration.

Perhaps a balance between "true" competitiveness and collaboration (ingrained thru coercive or non-coercive rewards) may solve those issues.

The success of SOA lies in the work culture!

I work for a large insurance company and have found that people have been oversold the concept of SOA. People focus too much on enabling services and processes and not enough on reuse. Reuse is only possible when you have processes, objects, services and business rules sharing the same data model. If not, no orchestration and way too many data transformations. I agree it is a hard concept to sell to my business units but they do understand the ability to keep costs down on a project and, for the most part, do not care how my teams delivers as long as we deliver.

The example in the article rings a bell for me. In our mid-sized super-regional bank, we have more power in the business units than in the support or executive functions. Therefore, we are trying not to "re engineer" processes and tools, but collect some intelligence on pain points and weak spots in the current environment and utilize conventional web services to streamline parts of the process. Over time, the idea is to follow up these modest successes with other web services that do not exist or are even on the radar screen of the organization.

Like Brad, out initial "sell" will be the re-use of knowledge objects to accomplish similar goals and standardize some business approaches and foster an environment of innovation.

IMHO, WS and SOA still appear more hype than reality. Users and IT divisions alike have long understood the necessity of integrated systems and of adopting architectures that faciliate easy integration. The case for WS and SOA projects exists the most when an M&A occurs and two completely disparate architectures need to be consolidated, merged and re-presented. I for one, am not willing yet to 'kiss the pig'.