Recommended reading: Service Orient or BE DOOMED !
"How Service Orientation will change your Business" is the subtitle of this book from ZapThink analysts Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, and that subtitle sets the stage for the entire concept of SOA better than most definitions of this term, which was recently voted "Most Confusing Acronym" by the Global Language Monitor." IBM had to write a book to explain it!? " was the reasoning behind this vote, and IBM has indeed written several books on the subject.
However, books from IBM naturally tend to focus on the technology in the IBM portfolio, and - essentially - Service Oriented Architecture - is not about technology.
"How Service Orientation will change your Business".
Succeeding in SOA isn't about huge technology implementations. It's about making a conceptual change to the way you drive you Business. A change that will facilitate change at a much more rapid pace than previously possible, powering business agility, one of the biggest challenges facing corporations in the modern business world. It is often said, that "inflexibility is the mother of all problems". Never has that been more true, and never has the consequences of rigidity in the markets been more grave.
This book "gets it" like few others. Bloomberg and Schmelzer manage to set the stage for Service Orientation without getting caught up in technology, vendor strategies and development methodologies.
Instead, the focus is on identifying and explaining the "generic" challenges in modern organisations, explaining the concept of Service Orientation and its benefits, and targeting some of the issues that will pop up, when trying to shift an organisation away from traditional methods and towards Service Orientation: Organisational resistance, or inertia, project funding and governance issues.
Service Orient or be Doomed is not trying to sell you a six pack of technology implementations, and the target audiences aren't the technical staff, but while management might be the obvious readers, everybody will benefit from the understanding that this book will provide, and if the entire organisation was to buy-in on the same understanding of the concept, the same reasons for the change, and the same priorities, the first milestone would be reached.
Recommended Reading 
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November 6th, 2007