To business strategists, reuse is an opportunity to create common solutions and harvest recurring value from otherwise sunk cost. To technologists, reuse promises an approach to avoid reworking already-solved problems, and developing a library of intellectual property to last beyond short-term needs.
Fulfilling this promise requires commitment at all organizational levels. The following will help establish reuse strategies within your agency.
1. Build a common understanding.
A vision of the organization's future -- and the capabilities necessary to get there -- is fundamental to a successful reuse strategy. This perspective must drive all resource decisions.
A formal articulation of the current business model and future needs will drive analysis of gaps and redundancies of current business capabilities, which drives a long-term road map of needs. Executive management should require that this road map be established, and that all projects not only solve a short-term problem but also advance the long-term vision. This first step towards business-IT alignment is a cornerstone of reuse.
2. View each new project as a portfolio of potential services before making investment decisions.
Each time an organization commits resources to examining or automating a process, there are opportunities to support reuse. Businesses should require that all projects document processes they seek to change, and require project managers to specifically gather input from other divisions and explore alternatives resulting in shareable or reusable services. For example, a project that requires validating a person's identification prior to providing services could create not only a short-term service, but also service for the entire organization. 3.
Adopt an integrator mentality.
A bias that each problem demands building a solution from scratch can blind leaders to the value of existing services or systems, and can ignore commercial off-the-shelf software.
An integrator mentality encourages documenting the problem at a process level, then assembling the right services to solve it. This approach emphasizes the interoperability of systems, workflow across systems and open standards whenever possible.
4. Deploy tools and techniques to accelerate reuse.
Many things can be reused -- technology code, service provider contracts, internal shared services, even business rules and processes. With technology reuse, however, specific tools -- such as repositories and directories -- and techniques must be implemented for service reuse to thrive. People must know what the technology service does, how to use it and where to find it.
Leveraging these tools requires a review of the organization's software development approach. Code reuse takes off when developers build loosely coupled, independent processes assembled by business rules, often through a service-oriented architecture. The individual services must have limited dependencies outside of the business rules so they can be reapplied to future problems. Training or mentoring may help some application developers espouse this new development philosophy.
5. Support an enterprise architecture.
The preceding four concepts form a strong basis for an enterprise architecture (EA), which has two components: a business architecture, which identifies, maps and describes an organization's key capabilities; and a technical architecture, which establishes guidelines on developing and deploying technology to support an organization's business objectives and long-term goals. Supporting EA also necessitates new infrastructure and business rules. An enterprise governance strategy needs people to review existing environments, establish standards and targets, and ensure future projects meet enterprise standards. Supporting EA also requires expanded business rules -- e.g., establishing chargeback systems for use of centralized shared services. While these are resource commitments, agencies with formal EA programs report deploying solutions faster at lower cost.
6. Make reuse a success factor.
Today, speed is a core success factor in IT programs. Reuse, however, requires discipline and a commitment to build quality pieces of work the organization will use for many years.
Reusability must be rewarded, and organizations should have a measure of reuse as a key success factor.
Leaders should also establish reuse for both business and IT. This is key to maintaining a commitment to our "right now" environments, while eyeing the organization's long-term needs.
