Well I sure hope not but the Global WebSphere Community is holding a one hour chat on the subject:
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Session dates: Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Starting time: 3:00 pm, GMT -05:00, Eastern Standard Time (New York)

Many organizations have started down the path of SOA, only to find that reality is more challenging than the hype. Businesses need to see ROI, and IT professionals have a hard time staying on the theoretical course. So, how are we going forward?

In this web-event, we will focus on the current problems around SOA, suggest successful strategies towards attaining SOA benefits and discuss how you can be the catalyst for improving IT and Business-IT alignment: essentially, making SOA work in the here and now.

Our main topic will be SOA governance: coordination, ownership, right-to-decide and versioning of services are all critical factors in SOA. Other topics will include: service lifecycles, portfolio management and an SOA maturity model.

The content of this event is based in part on the book “SOA for Profit, a Manager’s Guide to Success with Service Oriented Architecture”. After the event, we will send attendees an electronic copy of this book.

I don’t think SOA is dead by any means, but I do think that it can expose communication gaps that exist in companies which lead to the delays and corner cutting that hurt SOA implementation. If your company doesn’t really work together well between Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Developers and Administrators, you are going to have serious issues with any methodology you choose anyway. I think to be successful you have to breed a corporate attitude of the first impulse being “How can I help?” as opposed to “I’d like to help, but talk to my management chain first. Then we can schedule a pre-planning meeting about how we’re going to plan to……yadda…..”.