Reusing the Reuse Topic

Joe McKendrick had some good ideas around my thoughts on reuse, and some good original insights as well.

“However, there are three sticky questions around reuse: First, should reuse be a goal in itself, or does it play more of a supporting role to more business-focused higher-level benefits? Is it like trying to measure the number of times employees open up Excel spreadsheets through the day, versus measuring the insights and actions they take as a result of the data they get out of their spreadsheets?”

I think reuse should be a goal, and clearly we’ve had that on our radar in IT for some time. However, to Joe’s point, the core benefit is the value of reusing, not that fact that you reuse. There is a difference.

“The second question is even more vexing: is reuse even essential at all to SOA success? Suppose there are services that are only used by one application each? These services may offer streamlined interfaces that provide independence from the application underneath, saving countless hours of toil and disruption when the app changes.”

I think SOA can still have value without a significant amount of reuse. That’s my point, that we’re too focused on reuse as a metric when it clearly has secondary value.

“Third, suppose business units across the enterprise go wild with reuse, to the point where it gets difficult to track who is using what and how often? The SOA appears to be a raging success, but how is it helping the business? Is it amounting to anything? Is so, how can that be measured?”

This is the core issue around the need for SOA governance, best practices, and technology. I agree that we need to measure reuse, no matter if it’s occurring or not. I’m a big advocate of centralized control and management, albeit the typically enterprise is not. However, based on past experiences, I suspect we’ll not get to this kind of “mass reuse” anytime soon, so I would not worry about it.