A Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is more than just a bunch of web services (JABOWS), but which do you have?
- Do you have a place where services can be discovered, learned about and tried out?
- Are your services being reused, sometimes in unexpected ways?
- Are your service clients viewed as customers?
- Are you able to upgrade service implementations and interfaces without any disruption to your service clients?
- Do you know how your services are being used? Do you have service-level agreements that are being monitored and enforced?
- Do you have a service charging model?
- Are your developers enjoying and being rewarded for reuse?
- Do you have processes for regulating the usage and change of services?
- Are you able to provide dynamic capacity management?
- Do you have service development, interface and contract standards?
- Are your services secure?
- Do you have automated service regression testing?
- Does your business understand the need to protect its service assets, and to curb its appetite for tactical change?
- Could your services be easily exposed to the Cloud?
I think the last question is probably the most incisive. If the answer is no, then you are just doing a bunch of web services, no matter what lip service you pay to the other questions.