When to avoid implementation of SOA?

SOA offers a change in perspective, a paradigm shift from object oriented to service oriented.As for almost a decade, most of the development is done using Object oriented technologies and that led to tight coupling many a times with vendor specific technologies like CORBA,DCOM or RMI.SOA offers to a new thinking of services rather visualizing in terms of objects which makes it independent of underlying technology.

If SOA implementation in an organization is not well thought of,planned and micro-detailed then it may lead to disaster, waste of valuable resources of time and money.SOA may not be a good idea for enterprises which are not too big and complex in their business process and do not depend upon business processes of its suppliers and business partners.For instance, if an organisation which has distributed applications across the differ net geographies then it will be a good idea to implement SOA to integrate various applications to provide one cost effective,scalable and futuristic solution which will be capable to plug services on top of new applications.SOA does not make a good business sense for organization which have very simple business processes,not involving too many business entities where a lot of collaboration is required to complete the business, for example a small online business of selling decorative items,which does not have heavy and business critical dependency on its suppliers to do business in a limited area.

Avoid using SOA for the sake of it,makes sense when it helps orchestration of complex,multi department/partners/suppliers business processes to smoothen overall business value chain.

Moreover, a SOA project can be jeopardized due to lack of proper,detailed,refined business requirements,inaccurate project planning and more factors which I will take up in my forthcoming blogs which will primarily focus on shortcomings of SOA projects and how to avoid them.