This final category overlaps heavily with the last two—that is to say that, quite simply, the more standardized your environment, the easier it is for a given set of employees to get to grips with it. This automatically promotes all of the benefits we have discussed so far around reducing downtime, easier recruitment and on-boarding of staff, and so on.

Having set out the challenges that an SOE helps to address, we will proceed in the next section to look at the anatomy of such an environment to understand it from a technical standpoint.