Barriers to Agility Differ Across Organizations

A lot of folks talk describe the main benefit of SOA is the increased agility that it brings to the organization; mainly describing the architectural and technical approaches and mechanisms that bring about increased agility. The problem with that is that the barriers to agility at many different organizations are not technical in nature. Take the government for example, the reason it takes them such a long time to roll out a change in their IT systems is due to the processes or bureacracy that exists not because of technical challenges. Technical challenges exist but they are not the long poles in the tent. Many of these organizations can gain increased agility by first streamlining their bureacratic processes--for example, security certification and accreditation processes that are required before a system can go live--these often require a lot of paper pushing but don't really do much to ensure that the system is really more secure.