Strategic IT planning is critical for a successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) transformation. To get value from SOA, the effort must be business-focused. Yet many IT shops have historically done a poor job of aligning the IT strategy and portfolio with the business.
From a business perspective, we think of SOA benefits in terms of business process agility or the ability to create business processes from component services. But we also have to think about SOA in terms of IT strategic alignment. Are we focused on building services with the most benefits? Will our new services create flexibility for the most strategic business processes?
