If you are like many companies, you probably got the green light a few years back to start on a company-wide SOA initiative and have been steadily moving forward ever since. You've learned valuable lessons along the way, realized successes, and perhaps have even showcased your milestones to the executive team.

Then the economy hit a rough patch. Now, your SOA initiative is under closer scrutiny. Your budget has been frozen, and you're not sure of the staffing situation. Adding to the challenge, SOA technologies are changing at Internet speed.

While many IT managers and executives may be debating the continuation of their SOA initiatives, the reality is that the principles behind SOA-boosting productivity and customer satisfaction (eliminating information and application silos) won't ever disappear.

Companies are re-prioritizing strategic projects to meet any potential IT budget squeezes. There is even a shift away from SOA toward front-end projects such as mashups, cloud computing and software as a service. While these aren't interchangeable with SOA, they do share commonalities, since both SOA and cloud/Web 2.0 view IT as a strategic department that delivers business value.

A knee-jerk reaction may be to put an SOA initiative on hold. This is actually a counter-productive tactic that can be detrimental to a company's bottom line. Regardless of whether it is called SOA or something else, businesses will continue to look for ways to embrace integrating critical information across the enterprise and extend it to customers and partners.

You should continue on the path as it will deliver cost savings and enable you to more easily align technology with business goals. SOA, at the fundamental level, is about cost reductions by re-engineering and streamlining business, enabling reusability and eliminating redundancies. And it doesn't have to eat up a lot of your IT budget.

With this in mind, following are seven low or no-cost ways to maximize your existing investments and continue moving forward with SOA:

1. Use a phased approach. Treat an SOA project as one that is strategic, rather than tactical, but create an execution approach that is phased and manageable. Then determine the three most critical projects for the short term. The simplest way to do this is to focus on those projects that will have the most immediate impact on the company's bottom line. Look for the shortest runway to ROI. Hint: consider prioritizing customer-facing projects, which leads us to point number two.

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