This is the time of year when trend or predication articles start cropping up. Year after year I'm asked if I would be interested in writing about what's to come. You see I have an uncanny ability to pick lottery numbers. Unfortunately my lottery guesses, like most articles that look into the future, aren't right most of the time. So I usually say no, and leave my writing time to topics of here and now.

I was approached about the forward-looking topic, "What's Next after SOA." That one I couldn't turn down. Oh, what an opportunity to write about SOA 2.0 or is it 3.0? Come on, I hear the Web is up to version 4.0. The title "What's Next after SOA" frustrated me. We seem to thrive on moving on before we finish our job. Maybe this is a high- tech/Silicon Valley thing. I think that in the heartland of technology use - like in government and most real companies like banks - getting SOA right is a multi-year, maybe even a multi-decade journey. These are organizations that start with, let's say, 40 years of information technology heritage that can't be thrown out. So what's the point about talking about what's after SOA before we've even conquered effectively implementing SOA. So with a little word change in the title from "after" to "in," I'd like to muse for a minute about "What Next in SOA." Some thoughts on what we must do to get the tremendous benefit SOA can offer our organizations.