But businesspeople are often aware of the extra effort required for services and may not want to pay for them. "I’ve heard this a hundred times," says Gleason. "A business sponsor says, ‘Well, if you’re going to make me pay for creating this service the first time, you just blew away the cost benefit of my project, and it’s not going to get sponsored. And so I want you to go ahead and hard-code the integration because I need that functionality.’ But then my job is to help them see how creating that service is not really a project artifact; it is a business architecture artifact. We’re creating a piece of our business infrastructure that can be reused and changed. Once you get people to understand the requirement for doing that, then they stop worrying about whether it costs more to create it initially than it would to hard-code the thing."

Q: How much reuse can I expect from services? And what does that mean in real dollars?

A:¿Reuse of services can vary widely and depends on the rigor of the design, which in turn depends on the abilities and experience of the developers and project managers, says Heffner. Reuse also depends on the level of architectural planning that surrounds the specific service. For example, a service has more chance for reuse if it is developed as part of a broad SOA strategy that includes uniform development methodologies, a centralized architecture planning staff and business analysts who can examine processes across the company and incorporate the unique needs of the business units into the design of the service. "If a service isn’t designed with knowledge of how other parts of the organization may want to use it, it’s unlikely that those groups will adopt it," says Gleason. Worse, designing a one-off service could lead to duplication of effort down the road. "You may need to create a second service to complement it because you don’t have time to modify the first, or perhaps you’re going to have to rebuild the thing because now it doesn’t meet your requirements," says Gleason. "In the long run, there’s no hope for business process integration, or business process management, if I don’t look at services from an architecture perspective."

But if a service can be reused even once, it can have an exponential effect on savings, according to Heffner. Even though services require more up-front design work, reuse means there will be no costs for design, coding or unit testing the next time around. Together, these steps account for about 40 percent of a software project cost.