Financial services firms that have implemented services under a service-oriented architecture are finding that they can be more expensive, less reliable, and harder to maintain than standalone applications, says Sajay Sethunath, chief architect for BearingPoint's financial services consulting business.

His conclusions should be a warning to other industries. IT departments tend to pick the low-hanging fruit and build services that they know will be reused by several applications, he says. But too often they haven't established a metric to show how the effort leads to savings. What's worse, Sethunath says, many of the services aren't even what business users want.