Service-oriented architecture. It's not a topic I claim to know much about. I leave that up to our resident integration expert and blogger Loraine Lawson.

I do know that The Open Group's SOA Work Group's mission is to develop and foster common understanding of SOA in order to facilitate alignment between the business and information technology communities. This group has put together an SOA Source Book, which is a collection of source material for use by enterprise architects working with SOA. An excerpt of the book was posted in IT Business Edge's Knowledge Network today.

The entire book consists of material that has been considered and, in part, developed by the SOA Working Group. The collective is engaged in a work program to produce definitions, analyses, recommendations, reference models and standards to assist business and information technology professionals within and outside of the Open Group to understand and adopt SOA.

The future of SOA has been the topic of discussion among several analysts and in the Knowledge Network discussion board. Let us know what part you think SOA plays.