I've just finished reading "Service Orient or Be Doomed!" written by Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer. The authors almost directly declares that this is not a technology book, but rather a book about business and how technology will affect business and what advantages it can bring. This promise of not becoming techie (even though they describe themselves as nerds) is something they manage to stick too, and I would with ease recommend you to give this book away when trying to sell SOA to the business side. Or side, as they do very clear, there should be no sides anymore, instead Service Orientation should bring business and IT closer together.

The first part of the book that describes today's IT landscape, how we got there and why we shouldn't continue to add more glue (middleware). From this problem description they move on to describe why service orientation is the solution to these problems. They do a good job describing loosely coupling and why that matters. In my point of view the parts on architecture are the weakest. It's great that they bring enterprise architecture and it's role in the enterprise and service orientation efforts to the table. But when they do so by spending almost more time with Rational's 4+1 view, after a short coverage of Zachman Framework it looses some credibility from my point of view. Worth noting is that they have added two things too the 4+1 view with Information View and Data View which is a good thing, since Rational's 4+1 always have missed the importance of information. It gets more interesting again when they bring agile methods to the table, and I think this is the first time I read someone that suggest a combination of enterprise architecture and agile development methodology.

In all this is still a book well worth it's read for both techies and business people which covers many aspects of what it requires to start getting service oriented. They don't cover the technical parts of service orientation, but instead brings subjects as people fear of change and governance into the light. They have great introduction of many important concepts like metadata, services, Web Services and loose coupling, but all with a business focus. Go get one for you self now (it won't hurt you to read a non-technical book)!