[4] To ensure that the move towards service-orientation is a positive change that delivers on its promised benefits, it is helpful to adopt a set of rules.
Erl has identified four service-orientation characteristics as follows:[15] A vendor-neutral service-oriented solution helps to evolve the underlying technology architecture in response to ever changing business requirements.
Unlike traditional silo-based application development, a SOA takes into account the requirements of either the whole of the enterprise or at least some considerable part of it.
A service-oriented solution enables to deal with new and changing requirements, within a reduced amount of time, by making use of existing services.
This is because services are an enterprise resource, i.e. giving the confidence that they conform to certain standards and could be reused within multiple solutions, so in order to remain such a resource, they must emerge from a process to which these principles have been applied consistently, as an inconsistent application would result in services that are not compatible with each other, resulting in loss of the fundamental service-orientation design characteristics.