PHASE FOUR: DOMINATION

The final phase of Web services adoption is the culmination of the previous three phases—integration, collaboration, and innovation. The dominance phase will be based on superior performance in business as well as on the use of Web services to achieve innovation. Dominance will be established by the few key players in each industry that are able to realize the full potential of Web services. Those that dominate will have achieved internal cost and efficiency gains, as well as having significantly improved their ability to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers through the implementation of Web services.

The winners in the dominance phase will emerge as commerce hubs at the center of Web services-enabled ecosystems. Dominant organizations will use Web services to link their internal value chain and extend it beyond the organizational boundaries to include partners, suppliers, and customers as illustrated in Figure 3.6. Through the use of Web services, these organizations will achieve reduced operating costs, improved organizational flexibility, and dramatically faster time to market.

Figure 3.6: Extending the value chain with Web services.

Business Landscape

The dominance phase of Web services adoption will be characterized by the following traits:

• It is likely that leaders in the dominance phase will either be newly emerging organizations, or will have been early adopters of Web services during the integration and collaboration phases, and will have been the first to determine how to innovate using Web services.

• Extended business processes spanning multiple organizations will become commonplace. Organizations will operate as part of truly interconnected ecosystems of businesses.

• Dominance phase leaders will have demonstrated the ability to drive internal integration costs down, and will have learned the pitfalls of Web services.

• Leaders in the dominance phase will use Web services to enable new ways of delivering information-based value to the organization as well as to customers, partners, and suppliers.

• Dominance phase winners will have learned how to use Web services to achieve real innovation, perhaps fundamentally changing the dynamics of their chosen markets.

By the time dominance has been established by forward-thinking innovators, the technologies and standards required to build-out Web services will have matured considerably, to the point where they are a key component of most organizations’ technology infrastructures.

Planning Considerations

During the domination phase, Web services will be used as core application building blocks in which applications will be implemented as an orchestrated workflow of networked Web services. The ability to quickly and easily modify these workflows will allow greater organizational flexibility and adaptability, which will be a key element in allowing organizations to maintain a dominant position in their chosen markets.

The domination phase will undoubtedly see the emergence of new industry-leaders, as well as the continued domination of current leaders who have the organizational and cultural traits required to take advantage of the disruption created by Web services. It is likely that we will also see the decline of organizations, perhaps current dominators themselves, who are not able to effectively adopt Web services into their businesses. They will find that their internal systems are too inflexible to allow them to adapt to changing market dynamics, and that the ability to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers is undermined by competitors who have exposed selected processes using Web services to support extended business processes.

Remember, the key difference between the dominant organizations and the rest of the pack is the application of Web services to their businesses. Adoption of Web services technology will not be the biggest challenge for most organizations. Driving significant business value and competitive advantage through the use of Web services is the real opportunity and the real challenge.

Plan of Action

To attain market dominance using Web services, organizations will need to master the application of Web services for business value and market differentiation. The simple application of Web services to support current business practices will not be sufficient. Critical activities will include:

1. Look for innovation opportunities which will allow you to do the following:

   • Reduce costs and improve margins

   • Create new market opportunities

   • Increase the barriers to entry for competitors

2. The next disruptive influence is right around the corner, or perhaps is already arriving, so don’t disband your innovation team. They should continue to think “Out of the Box” and should be tasked with looking beyond the horizon to determine how to leverage the next disruptive influence (for example, the semantic web and grid-computing).

The domination phase of the Web services adoption model will see the move to, and acceptance of, new business operating principles that leverage Web services at their core. New markets will be created that are enabled through the use of Web services. Current market leaders that do not leverage Web services will decline, and new leaders will emerge. Ultimately, Web services will fade into the background as they become part of the day-to-day fabric of how IT systems are implemented and how businesses operate as new disruptive technologies take center stage.