How SOA makes things better or even worse?

With all the hype that SOA has brought to organizations, they have to brainstorm whether this will do any good to their business anyway.The organizations first have to understand that SOA can not be implemented by introduction of certain software products or services but it is an architectural approach which has to analyze existing systems,IT resources,ever changing business processes and requirements and comes up with a set of business aligned services which can cost effectively fit very well for a consistent business functioning for years to come.

As discussed in my previous blog , SOA projects can easily be put into red zone if all its constituents are not well planned,managed and executed.A change is like oxygen for an organization and SOA has to help businesses adapt with changing times and technology too changes rapidly beyond our imagination and in these times keeping an IT plan for next ten years for an organization is a daunting task.No matter how smart we think SOA can take away all our business woes through new ideas , if not implemented with success then it may turn out to be a nightmare for IT people,with all flaks from business people.SOA brings technological,organizational and cultural changes to businesses and onus to succeed for ones business lie on all stakeholders involved.There is very thin line between success and failure in such type of initiatives.

I will summarize in following points when SOA can be a disaster for an organization and all its stakeholders:

1. When business requirements and business process of all stakeholders are not very well defined,synchronized and upgraded.

2. All redundant processes are not replaced with efficient ones and constant communication among all stakeholders(business partners,vendors,suppliers,architects,project managers,senior management etc.) is not frequent and productive enough to define clear scope of work.

3. A Enterprise Service Bus is not identified and established which is responsible for communication of different applications,resources in varied technologies and platforms to communicate with one another.

4. A definitive project plan with micro details of milestones,risks and their mitigation is missing.

5. An identification of various project critical services(applications,process,infrastructure,security,data access,integration,development,testing,monitoring) is not well defined and designed.

7. Improper performance tuning,scaling may mar sole purpose of efficiency of business functioning.

8. Development of new services as spaghetti services ignoring how well will it fit in large picture .