How does BIAN encourage software re-use?

The main type of re-use enabled by the BIAN Service Domains is business operational capability re-use – where the services of a specialized business capability are made available across the business. A Service Domain can be thought of as loosely corresponding to the functioning of an operational business unit. This is fundamentally different to the more traditional focus of solution systems development on software re-use. Two main categories of software re-use can be considered. One is business application solutions that can be (re)configured to support multiple functions (that can further be related to Service Domains) for example a Loans & Deposit business application may be (re)configured to support the roles of many different loan and deposit product fulfillment Service Domains independently (running in discrete partitions or as stand-alone instances).  The second is utility software, where some logic or algorithm is coded in a form where the software element can be bound in for re-use in many different business applications (each location the utility software is applied functions independently from any other deployed use). Re-use for utility software simply copies the same code (with whatever reconfiguration/adaption that might be needed) to reduce the software development overhead and improve consistency.

These two important SW implementation approaches can be related to the BIAN Service Landscape by overlaying some form of mapping. BIAN is currently working on approaches to formalize such a mapping in an initiative to define a vendor/solution agnostic BIAN application/IT model.