"True story: A financial-services firm built an application to track risk management on a Web-services platform. What had once been one application was broken down into 15 XML-based services, some of which were outsourced because they encompassed noncritical information. It was a sound plan; by outsourcing some of the component services, the firm saved both time and money on the project. But there was one thing the developers hadn't considered, and that quickly became apparent when the application was deployed.

It was chaos. Instead of one application logging data, there were 15 services that needed to be managed--and all were sending messages to the system-management application. That app would in turn notify the IT department of the errors it was logging. Not only did the risk-management application crash, but it took the system-management application down with it, both of them overwhelmed by the essentially 15-fold amount of data generated. The company eventually had to redesign the way messages were handled to ensure that the system-management application only logged the most critical ones.

And that, in a nutshell, is the conundrum of combining a service-oriented architecture, in which loosely coupled business processes are transformed into discrete interfaces that can be easily plugged and unplugged as business conditions require, with the outsourcing of those business processes to third-party providers. The advantage is the disadvantage. You can break business processes down to their most granular, logical elements; focus your development efforts on where you can provide the most differentiation; and let someone else handle the overflow or the low-profit transactions. But you open yourself up to a management challenge the likes of which you've never seen."

"At a fundamental level, the radical shift to SOA calls for a different mindset – a dramatically different one at that. The adoption of SOA shall signify itself to be an important development in the IT world. Software will be described as a portfolio of capabilities and possibilities instead of modularized applications. Data models will be standard-based and externalized to enable interworking between services, and data will be considered to be like any other form of "digital content" ever ready for exchange and transformation between systems."