Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Service Reuse

The more I think about the phrase "service reuse" or any other variation of it, the more I don't like it. I feel like it's making me think about services from a perspective that is too technical and too low-level. Reuse is something you want to achieve with code but you shouldn't be thinking about services as just code. When you're designing and building your services, you need to think about it from a much higher and more business-oriented perspective. You shouldn't be building a service because you think it's a great piece of code that other applications may be able to reuse. You build a service because it represents some significant capability of your organization that needs to be offered up to other units within the organization or external partners so that the business can operate more effectively. It's about sharing business capabilities and information, not reusing software. When you keep this in mind, you'll be more likely to build services that end up getting "more reuse" because you're providing valuable business capabilities or information that others need to use.

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1 comment:

Steve Jones said...

I blogged about this a while ago Services aren't about reuse its about use a very different proposition.