The rapid movement towards service orientation, on both the business and technology fronts, offers unprecedented opportunities for business-IT alignment. The authors argue that in order to achieve true agility in its service provisioning to meet rapidly changing requirements, an organization needs a multi-dimensional business-IT alignment strategy—alignment via architecture, via governance and via communication—integrated with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm to develop their service-based system. To help engineer such a service-based system with this integrated approach, authors have developed a 3-layer, multi-disciplinary BITAM-SOA Service Engineering Schematic. The schematic also serves as a process model for service design and management. This schematic is rooted in the Resource Based View theory perspective: business value can be created by IT-enhanced capabilities that can dynamically integrate resources. The strategic, managerial and practical implications of this schematic on service oriented implementations are exemplified and discussed. The schematic presented  in this article helps companies understand the necessary mechanisms and dissect the processes for engineering an SOA-based agile service system cost-effectively, integrating different perspectives and distinct approaches to alignment. In addition, this article contributes in the conceptual design of the modules and specifies links among modules (e.g., processes) of a service-based system using the BITAM-SOA framework.