Rourke on SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is about reuse. Period. All of the benefits people hope to see from SOA are derived from component-level reuse. The biggest barrier to this type of reuse is cultural, not technical. A proven way of rapidly inducing cultural and behavioral changes is through the use of KPIs or bonus incentives. I’ve recently seen two companies use exactly this technique to accelerate their evolution towards reuse cultures.

Motivate your IT architects and managers to reuse services by making such reuse a part of their bonus program. Reuse is a cooperative thing, and requires that both the provider and consumer are motivated. To further this cooperation, reward IT managers not only for reusing other services but also for having their services reused by others.

Incentive programs like this can go awry, but your SOA Center of Excellence (or Service Steering Committee) will protect your from problems of that sort.