The architectural merits of service oriented architecture (SOA) are now widely espoused, but there remains a significant challenge for organisations' IT development areas to deliver some of the perceived benefits - such as extensive re-use of existing code - from their development programmes.
The development of service-oriented solutions involves the assembly of a mix of existing services, and new ones that must then be developed, rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper. In order to maximise the benefit, designers must be able to refer to a definitive inventory of the existing services that are available to be re-used; for that to be possible, management processes earlier in the lifecycle must enforce the capture of information about the service offered by components, and this information must thereafter be referenceable.
