Lean and SOA - can they be friends?

I'm still struggling with the different strategies I'm hearing from different professors about process management and improvement. While lean production calls for a reduction in technology in order to simplify the process, SOA seems to improve the process by optimizing technology solutions. I can see the benefits of both, but I'm not sure that they can work together as well as Doug was saying they could. The point of lean is to expose the waste in the system and make it visible to the users of the system. Implementing a technology that requires user to input information both adds a step, and hides the information from the users. Lean is decidedly anti-technology solutions for this reason. 

SOA, on the other hand, automates decision-making processes. I think there is a time and a place for this, but I don't think it is always the right way to go about optimizing all processes.