Today, after receiving my book order of Understanding Enterprise SOA and Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide from amazon.com, I set out to start re-reading them in earnest. I'm looking to them to help shape my understanding of service-oriented architecture and the infrastructure we need to build for better data services on campus. There's lot of hype around SOA; I'm trying to distill some concrete actions I can recommend for my colleagues and me to take with respect to SOA. Furthermore, how can I explain this topic quickly and effectively to people throughout the organization, specifically for my context, which is higher education.