Came across this article which compares a Thanksgiving meal to SOA.

Here are the 10 items,

1. Like a Thanksgiving meal, it takes a lot of work to put together an SOA … and no one wants to clean up the associated mess that comes with it.
2. Reuse, the next round of Web services you build are the IT equivalent of next week’s turkey sandwiches and soups. You should be getting a lot of meals out of this feast.
3. Unless you find a way to spice it up or make it savory, SOA can be dry and a lot of people around the table may quickly lose interest. Also, like a big turkey meal, too much SOA can put you to sleep.
4. An SOA project can bring together a lot of people you rarely see. In fact, you probably aren’t sure you want to see some of them.
5. SOA can give rise to lots of interesting combinations, kind of like turducken (a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey).
6. Everyone offers up advice on how to cook up an SOA, but they always leave you with the distinct feeling that they aren’t so sure these tips actually work.
7. Standards, on Thanksgiving the standards are turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce. In SOA it’s WS-* specifications and communication protocols.
8. You can undertake lots of small projects while you’ve got your SOA bird in the oven
9. It takes a solid network and good communication to move all the food around a Thanksgiving table so that everyone gets to pick exactly what they want. In many ways, it’s a service-oriented meal dependent on a loosely-coupled infrastructure.
10. Screw up your SOA and you’ll never hear the end of it.