While service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural principle for information systems is gaining momentum in research and industry, the field of methods for designing information systems according to SOA is still poorly developed. However, the implementation of SOA design principles, e.g. service reusability, business alignment and autonomy, demands a methodical approach. In order to overcome the shortcomings of current methods, we have developed the SOA method (SOAM). The method is based on existing methods for SOA. Activities are specified along with roles, techniques, modelling notations and a meta-model. A tool supports all necessary modelling notations as well as the generation of XSD, WSDL and WS-BPEL from the models. The newly developed method has been compared to other methods using a laboratory experiment with students. Different methods have been used on different company scenarios; the results have been recorded using a questionnaire. Results show that according to the evaluated criteria, SOAM together with IBM’ s method gets the best scores. With respect to the alignment of the software architecture with business processes, one of the primary goals of SOA, SOAM received a better rating than IBM’ s method.