: As service management systems are deployed in an open service market environment, the pressures on their developers to shorten development times and improve the flexibility of systems will increase. Component reuse may help in alleviating some of these pressures; however, while object-oriented reuse is used in the definition of interfaces for management systems, the systematic application of reuse to the systems' internal design is not well established. This paper examines some of the approaches applicable to service management system development from the Telecommunications, Distributed Systems, Internet and Software Engineering fields. Experience in applying some of these approaches is presented, and based on this, refined approaches to service management system development are discussed.