Standardized Process Components

I went to a number of talks about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and got the techie talk about enterprise service buses and the like. This diagram is an attempt to explain the key concepts to business people and others who you might bump into in a line up.

Let's say you have a business process with a bunch of steps.
Other people in your organization also execute processes (with bunches of steps) to achieve business results.

You notice that your process has a "yellow step" that is quite similar yet different to yellow steps invoked in Tom and Dick's business processes.

You collectively come to the realization that you could standardize the yellow step and going forward all use it in the same way. So you agree on the shade of the yellow, put it in a library, put a wrapper around it and grab it from the library each time you want to use it.

As good citizens you agree that you will use the services maintained in the library, and each time you want to change what's in the library you will be nice and involve others in agreeing to the changes. That level of governance will help keep down levels of hissing, spitting and biting.