Corollary comment on the comment

AND ANOTHER THING!!!

Seriously, the most important thing to realize when learning to apply service-oriented techniques is that, as a provider of a service, you are owning a product.

The moment you bring your service in the open and people not under your control (like colleagues) start using it, you are operating a mini-software company, like it or not.

Once you have embraced this notion, you need to look at how successful software companies interact with their customers. You will then realize SOA is not such a bad model after all, and the patterns for how to resolve the new and unfamiliar issues are already out there.