Wait-and-see won't protect you

Moving your IT organization to service oriented architecture is hard, no doubt about it.  But, at the same time, avoiding SOA isn't going to protect you.  Whether you like it or not, you'll end up with many of the same problems in your IT environment whether or not you choose to wholeheartedly adopt SOA...

The fact is, whether you adopt SOA or not, you're bound to have many web services - whether you build them, they get deployed as part of packaged applications, or you use ones provided by 3rd parties (e.g. to integrate with saleforce.com).  Web services technology is inescapable even if you avoid the organizational shift to a "SOA mindset".

Whether you call it SOA or not, the moment you have services used by people that didn't create them, you have the potential to end up with a host of problems that range from performance issues, to domino-effect failures, to the inability to detect and resolve problems effectively.

On the other hand, if you apply basic web services management, you can get these problems under control.  Basic web services management lets you understand who's using what services, when, and how often.  You can also understand how the services are performing, their interdependencies with other parts of the infrastructure (for example, what database tables they depend on) and how to effectively detect, locate, diagnose, and resolve problems more quickly.