WEB SERVICES ADOPTION MODEL

Web services, like the Internet during the mid-1990s, will be adopted in phases based on what a company hopes to achieve and how it desires to operate within its chosen markets. It is important to note that there are significant differences that distinguish the adoption of Web services when compared to the rise of the Internet. Firstly, there is widespread agreement on the basic standards of Web services. All major platform providers, software vendors, and professional services organizations are embracing Web services standards. Secondly, Web services hold great promise for the realistic support of complex B2B transactions and processes that span organizational and business boundaries. Web services will be able to fulfill these capabilities primarily due to the broad support within the software industry for the acceptance of Web services standards.

Web services will be adopted in four distinct phases. These phases are based on how Web services will be implemented within organizations, within industries, and across the global business landscape. They are based on how businesses evolve and absorb new capabilities rather than on the use of technology for technology’s sake. Web services will initially deliver business value through enablement of information integration and collaboration, followed by increased innovation as new uses of Web services are devised. Finally, the effective use of Web services to enable superior business execution will lead to the separation of market leaders and first movers from the rest of the pack.

The four phases of Web services adoption are:

1. Integration

2. Collaboration

3. Innovation

4. Domination

These four phases of change capture how organizations will enter into the world of Web services, conservatively at first with internal integration projects, and then expanding into inter-organization, cross-firewall implementations with trusted partners, followed by further-reaching implementations with a network of trading partners. As cycles of learning are executed by the first movers, they will begin a wave of rapid innovation with Web services, developing new, industry-shaping and market-making distributed business solutions. These solutions will have the potential to completely reshape the competitive landscape of an industry. As innovation continues, and competitive advantage is extended through faster execution of industry-leading capabilities and strategic execution, these Web services thought leaders will eventually dominate their respective industries. They will demonstrate first-mover advantage. They will be the leading edge organizations that understand the information imperative of competition today—that information-based business models are critical to winning in today’s global economy.

Figure 1.1 depicts the evolution of Web services according to the Web Services adoption model.

Figure 1.1: Phases of Web services adoption.

Phase 1: Integration

The first phase of Web services adoption will begin with internal system integration projects. The need for internal integration derives from the myriad of information silos created by proprietary enterprise applications implemented to support activities such as financial management (general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable), costing systems, order management, procurement, and production scheduling. These enterprise applications are typically large, client-server implementations built with an internal, organization-facing view of the world, and oriented toward internal efficiency and controls.

In their initial deployments of Web services, organizations will write services that expose the functionality locked within enterprise applications and legacy systems, enabling that functionality to be leveraged by other applications or business processes. The integration phase of Web services adoption will prepare organizations for the next phase, collaboration. The lessons learned from applying Web services internally to systems integration and enterprise application integration problems will be leveraged for the benefit of external trading partners in the collaboration phase of Web services adoption.

Phase 2: Collaboration

The collaboration phase of Web services adoption will drive process and operational improvements in many business areas, provided that the integration hurdles can be overcome and that the tools and technologies are mature enough to enable true collaborative behavior. Maturation in the collaboration phase of Web services adoption will prepare organizations for the next phase, innovation. This phase of Web services adoption will spur a new wave of rapid business change, which will largely shape the next wave of Internet expansion worldwide.

Phase 3: Innovation

During the innovation phase of Web services adoption, organizations will devise completely new ways of doing business based around Web services. These firms will leverage what has been learned from internal integration projects and from collaboration projects with outside customers, partners, and suppliers. These organizations will be able to turn these lessons into new business processes and new sources of competitive advantage. They will use Web services as an innovation platform to drive new levels of business performance along multiple dimensions of their value chains.

The innovation phase will spur a wave of new ideas for how business processes can be distributed, organized, and executed across corporate and industry boundaries. With Web services, the notion of industry convergence has a higher probability of realization because of the widespread agreement that it is the right way to conduct business. The innovation phase of Web services adoption will eliminate major roadblocks to the widespread use of Web services to drive new business process innovation and, ultimately, dramatic levels of business execution and performance.

Phase 4: Domination

The domination phase of Web services adoption will be the culmination of the previous three phases: integration, collaboration, and innovation. The domination phase is where the winners are separated from the also-rans, based on their ability to drive superior business value through the use of Web services in Distributed Business Process Execution (DBPE).

The domination phase will be based on superior performance in business as well as in the use of and innovation in Web services. Dominance will be established by a few organizations in each industry that realized the potential of Web services, both in changing internally the ways in which organizations can operate and outperform their competition using their information technology capabilities.

This introduction to the Web services adoption model shows a very real high-level scenario for how Web services will be deployed by corporations. Chapter 3 explores Web servcies adoption in greater detail.