Despite all the benefits of service-oriented architectures (SOA) many organizations with significant investments in data collection and storage technologies still struggle with how best to embrace and deploy the new architecture in a way that leverages data assets.

Most cannot afford to re-engineer or replicate the vast amounts of data in existing data stores spread throughout the enterprise. And as concerns about data security, confidentiality, and compliance grow, system architects must balance the need for information integration and sharing with the imperative to protect and secure critical information systems.

Organizations want and need to integrate business processes, applications, and data rapidly, cost-effectively, and incrementally while ensuring immediate and ongoing benefits.

This paper discusses the numerous challenges faced by both large companies and federal agencies seeking to embrace SOA and details a metadata-driven, model-based approach to addressing them.