As described earlier in Chapter 2, Implementation Use Case, Weir & Bell Telecoms faced several challenges with their initial SOA implementation. A fundamental challenge identified by the SOA Assessment exercise was around the lack of visibility of existing SOA Assets at design time resulting in the duplication of Assets. The reason is simple, if an Architect or an SOA Designer is unable to view existing services when producing a design, chances are that the functionality will be duplicated across the enterprise leading to unnecessary effort and redundancy. Other challenges such as lack of team collaboration and lack of methodology contributed to the issue of visibility.
This exact situation occurred at Weir & Bell Telecoms. The company had around 60 existing SOA Composites at the time of the SOA Assessment. The capabilities delivered by these services were mainly around the supply chain and order-to-cash. For example, purchase order creation, credit checks, invoicing, inventory...