1. Already had a level of cultural and organizational maturity that supported SOA goals. The biggest hurdle in the way of maximizing the return on SOA is typically the cultural and organization structure that gets in the way of sharing and reuse. It is no surprise that those organizations who have already overcome this are already demonstrating the benefits of SOA.
2. Funding ensures appropriate mix of investment vs project spend. Closely allied to point 1. Successful organizations do not pour all their funding into product or LOB projects, but also ensure there is an appropriate balance of investment in shared assets and activities that might only realize benefits in the longer term
3. Organizational separation between provisioning and solution assembly. A key mechanism maximize organizational efficiency is the separation of the provision of Services from their assembly into solutions.
4.  Service Portfolio drives projects – not the other way around. The Service Portfolio is not simply a list of all the Services built and published by disparate projects regardless of whether other projects have any interest in them or not. Rather it is the inventory of enterprise assets from which projects source the capabilities they require.
5. Constant assessment of SOA Maturity. Successful organizations know where they are on the SOA Maturity curve and other appropriate process maturity models. Not only have they undertaken a formal assessment of their status, but they set targets and perform regular reviews.
6. Clear management direction. There is nothing like direction from the top. Too often we see SOA trying to make headway in a company from the bottom up. It can be a tough sale for the middle manager. In leading organizations, SOA is on the CIO’s agenda, and he or she is setting the pace for the rest of IT to follow.
7. Already had an IT portfolio well positioned for SOA. In many respects this is similar to point 1. The organizations that are most successful with SOA today are those who were doing it before it was called SOA. OK, SOA brings some particular principles and hence benefits that were not applied before, but organizations that already have a portfolio of modular systems, built on an inventory of shared components together with the use of appropriate technology are able to add additional layer of SOA with the minimum of effort.
8. Sound software engineering discipline that ensures reuse, consistency and traceability. Organizations achieved 7 because they applied best practices in software engineering such as CBD.
9. Compelling Event. If there is nothing like direction from the top, then there is also nothing like a big compelling event to focus attention. I don’t just mean an individual project deadline, but a real compelling event providing strong motivation to re-engineer the portfolio. This might be a big merger or acquisition, regulatory compliance deadlines that cannot be ignored, or a company facing terminal decline unless it reverses it fortunes or dramatically cuts cost. If SOA in your company is looking for a problem to solve, you will have to work hard to justify investment.
10. Strong IT Governance. Everyone asks me how they should address SOA governance, to which I respond what are you doing about IT governance? If you don’t already have a good IT governance framework in place SOA isn’t necessarily the best place to start addressing it. That said there are several facets of SOA that highlight the increasing need for governance so it might be the stimulus.

So, which of the top ten traits can you see in your organization? And how do you plan to address those you cannot?