Pat Helland - What is a service oriented architecture (SOA)?

Right on friend...

I have spent the last 6 years preaching this kind of thing to my coworkers at first and my clients now. Even before it had a name or at least before its name was known to me. In healthcare there are tremendous repositories of data that hold information encased within the confines of systems that were developed in Mesozoic times. Our firm has spend the past two years building on application paradigms that broke down those walls not by replacing those systems but by augmenting them with mechanisms for communicating their contents and meaning to other systems. In many ways our use of the .NET development tools and processes has provided the glue if you will to further that ideal. 

In the end we have processes and services in place that allow our clients to use what they are familiar with but to then have access to concatenations of relevant information from disparate systems. Its powerful stuff especially for folks used to working in the dark and relying on other to provide the light.