For decades, colleges and universities have been pursuing the elusive goal of streamlining business practices by tying applications together. Many institutions have achieved a degree of success by implementing a set of applications from a single vendor, but customized interfaces with external applications have proven to be expensive to create and maintain. “Integration” remains a major issue.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a modern application framework that leverages the power of Internet technologies to meet the growing requirements for greater flexibility and for the creation of new business models that will support secure and seamless inter-processing with disparate internal and external resources. SOA is more than technology; it is a design philosophy that treats integration as the primary design principle rather than as an afterthought. With SOA, business functions are created as reusable component services for the purpose of being joined together and choreographed to generate new and innovative business processing models. This paper is designed to provide institutional decisionmakers with a non-technical introduction to the concepts and technology of service-oriented architectures and the important role that SOA will play in providing colleges and universities with the agility and flexibility they are seeking.