Is SOA Being Employed as a Tool for Streamlining or Cutting Budgets, or is SOA a Victim of the Budget Knife Itself?

My opinion: "SOA is not even a factor in the larger discussion of budgets."

Budget decisions are made based on strategic, operational, and tactical objectives - in that order of preference. SOA really should not play a role in that decision as it is the means to an end. That is, SOA is the means to achieving IT alignment with the business with the end goal being becoming more "agile" in meeting the business objectives. So, the budget decision might be to marginalize the priority of a certain set of business objectives, which in turn might nix an SOA initiative. Contrarily, as other business objectives gain priority, SOA should be a consideration in the implementation of those objectives. So, the nutshell is that whether or not SOA gets used as a tool to stream operations or gets the knife itself is really a "side effect" of business level decisions related to long-term goals and objectives.

* Originally posted on ebizQ's SOA Forum on June 21, 2009