The benefits of a service-oriented architecture are widely touted by advocates, and easily understood by anyone in the C-suite: cost savings, risk reduction, and business agility through high reuse, interoperability by design, and loosely-coupled integration.
But while practitioners agree on the benefits, the methods for attaining them are evolving and conflicted. Spend any time perusing the SOAsphere, and it's clear that few areas of IT are as politically charged. Pervasive misinformation, coupled with religious drama, is the real reasons why many SOA initiatives stall or fail.
Source: CIO, http://www.cio.com