IT departments are managing increasingly complex IT portfolios. Yet as business needs change, these departments must still ensure that their technologies remain aligned with business goals. Failure to do so compromises organizational agility.

Service orientation is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution that breaks down information silos and maximizes business agility. Service orientation modularizes IT resources, creating loosely coupled business processes that integrate information across business systems. Each IT resource, whether an application, system or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. These capabilities are available through interfaces; complexity arises when service providers differ in their operating system or communication protocols, resulting in inoperability.

Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Service orientation uses standard protocols and conventional interfaces—usually Web services—to facilitate access to business logic and information among diverse services. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals. SOA ultimately enables the delivery of a new generation of dynamic applications (sometimes called composite applications). These applications provide end users with more accurate and comprehensive information and insight into processes, as well as the flexibility to access it in the most suitable form and presentation factor, whether through the Web or through a rich client or mobile device.