One of our all-time favorite industry analysts, Forrester’s Randy Heffner, has just published a new report on SOA adoption based on a monster survey of thousands of enterprises and SMBs. His most startling finding: While 14 percent of North American and European businesses said they would adopt SOA in 2006, only 2 percent did. Put another way, actual SOA usage rose from 39 percent to just 41 percent. As Randy dryly notes, “it is apparently easier to say that a firm will adopt SOA than it is to make specific plans and follow through on them.”Randy’s report goes on to say that, despite falling short in actual implementation, businesses’ depth and breadth of commitment to SOA is on the upswing, especially among larger companies. Optimism knows no bounds: 75 percent of the Global 2000, for example, claim they will adopt SOA by the end of 2007.The implication of the report is clear. SOA sounds great, but boy, is it hard. Especially on a wide scale, because doing it right generally requires rethinking how IT is organized. Right now just about everyone believes that SOA is the only way to achieve the Holy Grail of true enterprise agility (that is, a flexible app infrastructure that adapts to changing business processes). But if that was easy, we would have gotten there a long time ago. Technology Industry