Can Service-Oriented Architecture fit together with Enterprise Architecture?

In one of my previous blogs, I had put together my thoughts on the inter-relatedness between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I posted a similar question on LinkedIn, and I was surprised by the number of responses that I received. One of the responses was from James McGovern. Anyway, the question was, " Can service-oriented architecture fit together with enterprise architecture?".

From the answers that I received, there seemed to be a general sense of optimism on this topic of inter-relatedness between SOA and EA. Generally everybody seemed to agree that SOA and EA could fit together though they had different approaches to actually go about doing it. What was noteworthy was the variety of definitions of SOA. SOA was defined as:

• An architectural style which can be used within an Enterprise Architecture to organize business or technology components.
• An instance of an enterprise architecture
• SOA brings a paradigm shift in looking at the Enterprise Architecture.
• SOA being used as a band-aid to bring together older systems...Some folks seem to be so focused on building for SOA that they surpass solutions that may have been better/easier/less costly.
• SOA is a concept / pattern that can be used for the integration of dissimilar systems within an enterprise.

Even though it wasn't explicitly stated in the answers but there seemed to be common understanding of the definition of EA. That does make sense as EA has been around for quite some time now. The best diagram that I have seen so far, on this topic of inter-relatedness, is in one of the presentations by Ken Orr. It is the slide titled "The Merging of Concerns" (page 8).