British Airways (BA) is taking its first steps with service-oriented architecture (SOA) but warned that wider use could still be up to five years away.

Speaking at BA's annual 'IT Fair' near Heathrow this week, CIO Paul Coby said the company was using SOA around parts of its Employee Self Service staff portal.

He said: "The much-hyped SOA is really interesting. The promise is good and the possibilities are there."

Coby said SOA can help to define processes and then link them up more easily but added that the airline is taking a cautious approach until the market matures and best practices emerge.

He said: "If SOA in three to five years' time enables you to articulate that process design with your systems and enables you to change your systems with more flexibility, that's great... but I don't think anybody is anywhere near there. You need to be very careful."

Industry-wide standards also needed to emerge before companies would embrace SOA more widely, Coby said.

He added: "We don't want to invest in Betamax when VHS becomes the standard. There's no point in BA trying to go its own way on that. We will wait and see what standards emerge."

Andy McCue reported for silicon.com from London