You Know You're a Service Oriented Enterprise When....

Foxworthy did a great job of letting people know exactly what consitituted a redneck - the same is needed for the SOE ;-)

Your I.T. Department Supports SOE When:
- You demand that your EAI vendor use standardized integration logic like BPEL4WS.
- Your I.T. department has a role called the 'Service Architect'
- Your service architect uses an overly complicated rating system to assess the level of decoupling between all systems.
- Your developers have long debates on whether it should be a 'service' or a 'component'!
- You demand a list of wsdl's & orchestration scripts from any new package or ASP vendor before you buy.
- You believe that agility is more important that scalability.
- All the developers in I.T. have the "Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing" memorized.
- The 'fine-grained vs. course grained' argument resurfaces.
- It becomes uncool to talk about object-oriented design patterns, but cool to debate service-oriented design patterns
- You have an XML version of your job description and it's role based.
- You debate a business analyst on the difference between a 'business choreography' and a web service orchestration'.
- You really could care less about the Java vs. C# debate or the .Net vs J2EE debate - they'll both allow you to write your services...

You Know You're Succeeding as an SOE When:
- Business users create their own forms and use web services as the data source (e.g. XDocs, WSXL)
- The bottleneck for setting up a new trading partner is accounting or legal (not I.T.)
- The applications you use in an ASP model integrate with your internal back office systems.
- The majority of your ASP vendors integrate between each other via web services.
- Business users are afraid of losing their job to a, "new level of automation".
- Your business processes drive your software rather than your software dictating a business process.
- The last of the I.T. group figures out that asynchronous document based message passing WAS the way to go...
- You buy a pre-canned business process from a vendor.
- You work with your business partners to collaboratively design a new business process over the web in real time.
- You begin to view your orchestration scripts as your competitive advantage.

You're Scared of Your SOE When:
- Your poor performer fails his MBO's three quarters in a row and Monster.com is called via web services to begin the replacement process automatically.
- Your job performance evaluation is automatically transferred with you from company to company.
- You realize that the 'new level of automation' will enable your employer to expedite the outsourcing of your position to India.
- Your in I.T. and... you install a new software package and it dynamically discovers the other packages in your company and links to them without your help.