Domain inventory pattern

Domain Inventory is a design pattern, applied within the service-orientation design paradigm, whose application enables creating pools of services, which correspond to different segments of the enterprise, instead of creating a single enterprise-wide pool of services.

The Domain Inventory Design pattern by Thomas Erl asks, "How can services be delivered to maximize recomposition when enterprise-wide standardization is not possible?"

As per the guidelines of the Enterprise Inventory design pattern, it is beneficial to create a single inventory that spans the whole of the enterprise as it results in services that are more standardized, interoperable and easily composable.

Having established a well-defined boundary, the next step is to create a set of design standards that would regulate the extent to which the service-orientation design principles would be applied and any other related conventions, rules and restrictions e.g. how to create the data models, how to name the service functions, etc.

[9] Another important factor is that as different domain inventories are being built by different project teams, there is a higher chance of developing services with duplicate functionality as each team is unaware of the requirements of the other business processes that are being automated.