The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.9. Getting the Most from Your Assets

As I mentioned earlier, one of the business benefits driving SOA initiatives is the opportunity to reuse business components, which may be just one or several parts of a complete working system.

For example, a bank might offer a Web service that performs loan appraisals (by looking up assessor files) as just one part of its home loan system. In a pre-SOA world, this capability would be locked inside the home loan application. In an SOA world, this capability would be exposed to the world by a well-defined interface so that team members, business partners, bank regulators, and so forth, might have access to it.

Rather than having team members or partners redoing, re-creating, and rerunning the same assets over and over again, SOA allows you to ensure that assets are created, shared, leveraged, and extended properly.

Instead of writing code, you can reuse what already exists within your organization, or use code provided by someone else. This provides huge savings by reducing the cost of development. Sometimes the best way to program is not to program at all.

And as we said, you are in a conversation with your service consumers. You cannot simply dictate terms to them; you are going to have to evolve a process in which they can participate.