Great post Dave. I especially like your closing comment "In essence, developers and architects are so frustrated with the people and process issues within the enterprise that they are circumventing the politics and turf issues by outsourcing bits and pieces of architecture to Web-based development and hosting resources. I can’t say that I blame them"

Very true.... One of our clients has a successful SOA initiative because they outsource their development and maintain design control. Corporate architects who design and manage solutions to execute marketing campaigns took a rationalized portfolio approach and have forced outside contract development shops to re-use existing components. Rather than re-build an entire solution to support new campaigns, they force re-use of services.

Effecting change via arms length negotiation between customers and outsourced providers is often a more expedient tactic than wrestling with internal politics and ownership fiefdoms. There is a pre-requisite; the architecture team must keep an eye on the commonality and variability across multiple projects and have an appropriate amount of design control.