Over the past months I've been researching the topic extensively, and had come to the conclusion that there are four key aspects to SOA's potential business value: increased flexibility of systems; increased reuse of assets; increased business comprehensibility of systems; and increased visibility of the value that IT delivers. As the list shows, the second of the key elements I've talked about is “reuse”. I've seen a lot of other people talking about reuse in the context of SOA, too.But a couple of weeks ago, at an IT architecture conference, I finally became convinced: reuse is the wrong word for what people think about when they think about how services get published and consumed in a SOA initiative. A much better word is sharing.
