Best Advice

The best advice this author can offer to business executives who are trying to figure out what to do about Web services is as follows:

1. If you make enterprise business-strategic decisions, it's time to become familiar with Web services. It is fairly straightforward to write and implement Web services applications there are plenty of tools and utilities that can be used and there are some fairly comprehensive application server environments, such as IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, that can enable you to easily write Web services applications. So get your feet wet start to become familiar with Web services concepts and start to prototype applications now.

2. Be aware that you have a year or two to become competent in Web services. Over the next few years, thanks to fast movement on creating standards by the W3C, many Web services shortcomings in the areas of reliability, security, manageability, and the like will be remedied. Expect that in two to three years Web services will start to proliferate (as UDDI public registries start to publish the availability of more and more Web services). At this point, be prepared to start shifting your application development efforts toward a Web services architecture or risk your competition's doing so (and potentially disrupting your way of doing business).

If you are an individual, technically competent user, it is time for you to become familiar with Web services. New "agents" are coming to market that can do work for you and help improve your personal productivity. Start reading up on Microsoft's .NET strategy and its various Web services programs that can help you simplify message handling and calendar activities. And then use your imagination start to look for new services coming to market that may be able to assist you in both your personal and business life.

Further, observe that your organization's initial experiments with Web services will likely fail if:

• The data that you seek to exploit cannot be put into a format and content architecture that enables you to share it with other applications;

• Applications can not be easily found and bound. Without being able to automate the process of finding and using Web services, application programmers will have to manually implement linkage to service applications in their code (defeating the automated/unattended aspect of Web services); and

• Your enterprise does not pay attention to how to flow Web services applications efficiently. Improper workflow and convoluted business processes make processing harder to do (thus defeating one of the key reasons for implementing Web services to realize productivity and efficiency gains). As Web services start to proliferate, close attention needs to be paid to business process management and workflow in order to maximize potential efficiency gains that automated Web services can deliver.