In his famous book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," Andrew S. Grove, one of Intel's founders and a legendary CEO, discusses a concept he refers to as the "Strategic Inflection Point." To quote the author, "a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end." The author goes on to explain the importance of recognizing these inflection points (which he admits can sometimes be hard to put a finger on), and identify response that need to be taken.

"A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness," said Grove.

One such Strategic Inflection Points that has gotten IT's attention lately is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Gartner predicts that by 2008, more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as a "guiding principle" when creating mission-critical applications and processes. Let's go over three main principles that IT shops need to take seriously if they are serious about SOA.

Involve Customers
SOA is all about making a fundamental change to the way in which IT approaches a project. What is this fundamental change? Is it putting together a SOA infrastructure? Is it establishing an Integration Competency Center? Is it building applications as services? Is it increasing reusability? While all these are important, the fundamental change is all about involving the customers intricately in the process of building the application. How do we involve customers?

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  Customers should be involved in modeling processes that are implemented in SOA. SOA and BPM are intricately related in this context. Any new/major IT project needs to start with the customer laying out the current business process and IT laying out the plan for implementing this using SOA. To quote the paper "SOA Needs BPM" , "SOA makes the connection between process design and process implementation an operational reality."

• Similar to Object Orientation, SOA adoption has an upfront cost associated with it. Also similar to how Object Orientation increased maintenance efficiency, SOA adoption increases business agility. IT needs to inform customers about this upfront cost and get their buy-in.

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