What Does SOA Mean For Your Business?

For the past two years the popularity of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) has been steadily increasing. Just check-out this Google Trends report. This begs the questions:

1. What exactly is SOA?
2. Why should one care?
3. Is SOA just marketing hype?
4. Is SOA just for technical-types? What does a business person need to know about SOA?
5. How does SOA benefit one's business?
6. How should one get started implementing a service-oriented architecture across an organization? What are the pitfalls?
7. Who benefits most from SOA?
8. How will SOA impact my existing infrastructure and business processes?

Over the next few posts, I hope to address these and related questions, providing greater clarity into a complicated issue with this new architecture.