Before You Reuse, Get Your Ducks in a Row

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March 19, 2007

Before You Reuse, Get Your Ducks in a Row

There has been a raging debate across the industry about whether reuse is the value that can be found in SOA, or if it's merely the latest attempt at object-oriented development.

Marcia Kaufman of Hurwitz Group is in the reuse-is-value camp, and goes as far as comparing software/service reuse to the standardization and reuse that happens within automobile assembly plants. "The reuse of IT assets is not so different from the reuse of components in manufacturing," she observes in a recent article. "Automobile manufacturers do not make a different engine for each model of car they sell; they make a small range of engines and install them in a wide variety of models. Once a new engine has been tested and documented, its reuse in a wholly new model gets the new car to market much faster."

That makes a lot of sense, and it makes even more sense to redeploy software and services across different types of applications without reinventing the wheel. However, reuse won;t magically happen when you put those services out there. Effective reuse requires rock-solid governance to deliver value to the business.

Kaufman cites three risk areas that can render reuse as a useless exercise:

Poor process: "Collaboration between business and IT needs to result in the business having a clear understanding of which definitions of data make sense and when to use them, how to apply rules and what level of granularity is appropriate for business services. Effective reuse will be much harder to achieve unless there is a framework in place that ensures that business and IT are singing from the same song sheet."

Poor code management: "When software components are changed then the changes apply everywhere -- often resulting in unintended consequences. A strategy for reuse of business services must include an approval process for changes which begins with the owner of the business service."

Lack of overall control: "What if, for example, each business unit in a transportation services company follows a different process for extending credit to customers?" If the business wants to create a shared business service for this process, it needs to determine who owns the business process and how will changes be controlled.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us