It has to be remembered that SOA is the process of putting in a new architecture. A new way of building applications. So yes it will take time. But, we at Mindreef work with lots of fortune 1000 companies that are approaching SOA in a very pragmatic way and are starting to see competitive advantages in doing so. Some things to remember when moving to a Service-Oriented Architecture.

The approach must be both bottom up and top down.
Bottom up: Because the technology to build a Web service is new. From designing industry compliant WSDL contracts, to developing the services, to learning how to test a Web service are all new. So even doing point-to-point services within one department is important. This way when departments begin to integrate and place their services into the SOA they have some expertise.
Top down: Since these new applications will involve services that go across LOB there are two important parts that need to come from the top. The first is control of granularity. Each business will have a service granularity that works best for their needs. Some companies may have just a few large services while others may have hundreds of smaller services. This will depend on business needs and should be controlled from the top. Also the SOA is going to need some infrastructure to support it. Most notably is a registry and quality. Quality needs for a SOA are different than for just and application. Quality leads to trust, trust leads to reuse, reuse leads to agility and the real ROI.

But as you have probably noticed all of this is cultural change on how your people are building applications. Change takes time.

Frank Grossman
CTO
Mindreef