Mike Kavis at ITToolbox has a good article up on his approach to "selling" SOA approaches to executives. As you might expect if you have ever done any of this sort of lobbying, it revolves around describing the business benefits of the approach and only afterward getting into the technical aspects.

My question is, how is this different from selling any technology project to non-technical people? I mean, if you are just looking to "make a sale" or from the CIO perspective "pick up a cool project" then you can always break out some bells and whistles and use them on execs who are susceptible to the toys and candy bribery that sort of thing entails, but if you are trying to seriously convince serious business executives to implement an IT project... don't you always have to get them with the business benefits instead of the technology?