There are many roadblocks to achieving measurable return on investment (ROI) from reusing Services, both technical and organizational, but perhaps the greatest of these is the human tendency to want to have something of our own as opposed to sharing someone else's. After all, we all learned to share in kindergarten, but we didn't like it then, and we don't like it now! If your own team builds a Service, it's bound to do just what you want, while if you share one from elsewhere in the enterprise, then all bets are off.

The most familiar approach to addressing this issue and ensuring proper service reuse is to establish effective governance -- the creation, communication, and enforcement of policies, primarily for service creation and consumption. Establish enterprise reuse policies and govern these policies as part of a comprehensive governance framework, and people will reuse services -- or else. ZapThink has spoken many times about the importance of governance, to be sure, but the fact remains that the more governance you have, the more rigid your organization becomes. And after all, no one actually likes to be governed. This innate distaste for governance is actually interfering with some organizations' SOA efforts. Fortunately, ZapThink has an admittedly unconventional approach to resolving this anti-governance climate.