That was the message from several speakers at Georgetown University's SOA Summit in Washington, D.C., this week. Their goal is figure out how best to embrace SOA as a way of breaking down rigid business applications into dynamic pieces that can be tied together on the fly to meet changing business conditions.

Steve Wolf, senior enterprise architect at Marriott International Inc., for example, said that one of his company's biggest hurdles is retraining developers to think of composing applications as an iterative approach rather using the traditional waterfall method. That older development process from beginning to end often lacks collaboration and can be highly compartmentalized.

"The hardest part is we're talking about an entirely unfamiliar development environment, and you can't be using a waterfall approach," Wolf said.

The entire development process, including gathering requirements, testing and managing IT operations, has to be revised to support an SOA, he said. Developers in different departments might need to learn to reuse a service that, for example, can calculate a hotel room rate, instead of recreating it each time they build a new application that involves those calculations. But developers don't typically like to rely on others for that type of work.

As part of its move to SOA, Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott is adopting IBM Rational's unified process as part of a project to standardize its use of Web services by the end of 2007, Wolf said.