In an earlier post I had introduced the idea of horizontal and vertical reusable assets. In this post I want to compare them so it is easy to differentiate one from the other:
| Characteristic | Vertical Reuse | Horizontal Reuse |
| Applicability | Only for applications within a specific domain or closely related domains. This is the primary focus when building product lines | Applicable across the board for applications regardless of domain. These assets typically tend to be utilities that are generic to multiple applications. |
| Domain relevance | High | Low and can be non-existent |
| Availability outside the firm (i.e. commercial and/or open-source solutions) | Low. Domain specific assets tend to be unique and create value by differentiating your firm from its competition. Hence, availability outside the firm tends to be low. | High. Domain agnostic assets don’t tend to be unique to a particular organization. E.g. logging or simple data transformations etc. |
| Potential to create competitive advantage | High. | Low |
| Asset Variability | Varies from well-defined to open-ended depending on the complexity in the domain. Variations typically aren’t well understood and even if they are, they may not be accurately captured in reusable assets. | Tend to be more well-defined than open-ended. Reason? Variations are well known, tend to change less over time, and have been analyzed several times. |
| Key stakeholders | Has to be a combination of business stakeholders and technology. Business knowledge is fundamental to capturing domain variations and relationships and technical expertise is necessary to produce executable software. | Tend to be primarily technology. Some assets may require operations or production support teams to provide input as well. E.g. your firm may have a logging or error handling standard that the reusable asset needs to adhere to. |
| Relationship with SOA & BPM | These assets are typically business services, data services, business rules, etc. | These assets are typically utility services. |
With lower levels of reuse across multiple applications you might be asking yourself if it is a good idea to focus on vertical reuse. My recommendation would be a resounding yes. Vertical assets are unique to your organization. They can be invaluable investments for your firm and require more than just technical expertise to create.
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