The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an approach to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This modular approach to defining business flows as technology independent services has gained unanimous popularity among end-users and technology vendors alike. Although there is a significant amount of ongoing research on the potential of service oriented architectures (SOAs), there is a paucity of research literature on the factors affecting the adoption of service-oriented computing in practice. This paper reviews the current state of the technology, identifies the factors influencing the decision to adopt service-oriented computing as an enterprise strategy and discusses the associated research literature, and concludes with a suggested research agenda and conceptual framework for investigating the use of service-oriented computing in practice.