"We've been talking different languages for the past 20 years," Brown said.

At its core, SOA is process oriented and gets business people thinking in a process-oriented way. To help create real-time process visibility, adoption of business process modeling tools alongside SOA is important.

"Getting business [people] thinking about how processes should work [is] very complicated. BPM tools let you capture the processes out of peoples' heads and write them down," he said.

For financial services in particular, one of the most important considerations in SOA development is process effectiveness, Brown said.

"At Merrill Lynch we focused on operating efficiencies, put everything on standards. Our major cost is driven by process integration and data. Those two things are driving the strategy at Merrill Lynch," Brown said.