Officials at Wachovia Corp., Railinc Corp. and other large corporate and government IT shops have taken measures to tackle the myriad challenges that come with using SOA technology, including changing roles for developers and architects and a blurring of the lines between IT development and operations groups.

Wachovia's retail banking division this month started work on a new multiyear SOA project to create business processes from Web services that can be used in a new call-center application and eventually be reused across the bank's various customer channels.

The project is the division's first foray into designing, assembling and managing common business processes that span multiple channels, and the IT shop is feeling the pinch of the transition.

This and an earlier, less-complex SOA project are already presenting challenges to Wachovia developers, who must adjust their mind-sets from the traditional waterfall development approach to a more iterative one, according to Harry Karr, strategic architect for the retail banking division at Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia. Using the waterfall approach, developers build monolithic applications in one fell swoop. The iterative approach calls on one group to develop a service, for example, while another builds a client to consume a service, explained Karr.

To ease the taxing transition for its application development group, the division brought in new tools for designing a development process and created new IT roles.