Enterprise architecture is both a blueprint and road map that ties together IT, data and business processes against business goals and strategies and presents them in one enterprise view. It visualizes the relationships among these practice areas so that organizations can use facts to analyze how well their IT supports their business operations today and in the future.

This enterprise architecture perspective is critical to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations which involve the loose coupling of applications in multi-vendor, multi-platform environments. It provides the enterprise view of the "interop-erability" of services and is one of the key requirements for success. Enterprise architec-ture delivers the information and analysis that helps organizations understand how to leverage the true value proposition of SOA.

This paper will discuss SOA as more than a technology. Rather, SOA can be viewed as an overarching architectural principle that opens the door to using IT technology in new ways to help improve efficiency and productivity and provide value to both providers and consumers of services. SOA initiatives can help drive a collaborative effort between business and IT with the goal of improved agility.