Chapter 9: The End Is Only the Beginning

OVERVIEW

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Sir Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942

By now it should be clear that Web services are not hype, but they are also not a “silver bullet” for information technology. We believe that Web services will become a business reality based on the compelling business value that they can deliver and based on the industry-wide support they have garnered from major software and platform vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, HP-Compaq, Oracle, and BEA, to name a few. The specifics of how Web services will evolve and spread into our daily work and personal lives will unfold over the coming years as standards stabilize and corporations come to grips with Web services.

This book began with a simple goal: to explain Web services to the executive reader, presenting a balanced view of Web services to allow the reader to evaluate the potential value of Web services and initiate appropriate action within their organization. That challenge has not been an easy one. As this manuscript was prepared, standards came and went, acronyms changed and morphed, and the industry hype machine churned out the spin on Web services. Research on Web services has been a realtime experience as we watched new ideas emerge from industry factions, standards groups, and vendors, each promoting their own particular perspective and claims as to what Web services are and will become. We have sought to separate vendor and media hype from reality, explain what Web services are, and how they work, and help potential adopters evaluate, from a business perspective, how they may impact organizations. We have avoided brash predictions, and have not painted glorious visions of how Web services will unfold. We have, however, tried to develop a consolidated view of how Web services might be adopted by organizations, both from a short-term, “What should I do today?” and a long-term, “What do I need to consider for the future?” perspective.

We began our journey with a dialog between a CEO and CIO. This dialog was meant to symbolize two things. First, we suggest that it is indeed possible for a CEO to team with a CIO in delivering business performance to an organization. The notion of IT and business users working together to create business value and competitive advantage, based on more effective use of information assets, processes, and capabilities, is not new. However, it could be argued that such an approach has been hampered by the failure to leverage IT as a strategic resource. Second, this dialog was intended to emphasize this book’s intent to take a businessoriented perspective on Web services, not purely a technology-based perspective. We believe the adoption of Web services will be better achieved through the demonstration of businesses’ benefit, not based on the technological elegance of Web services.

We then introduced the Web services adoption model to describe the phases in which Web services are likely to be adopted by organizations into their business operations. The Web services adoption model represents our perspective of how Web services will be deployed in organizations over the next several years—based on current adoption patterns and vendor capabilities. The specifics of how each step in the adoption model will eventually play out will likely differ in specific details, but the broad steps in the path toward Web services adoption are clear.

• Phase 1: Integration— Why is integration the first phase? It provides low-hanging fruit, but also mainly because it is an on-going challenge for many organizations today. Using Web services to tackle integration issues can save money and enable improved business performance. For these reasons, integration is a natural starting point for Web services adoption.

• Phase 2: Collaboration— Collaboration has been a talking point for many years, but has not delivered on its promise due to the immaturity of tools, as well as a lack of supporting standards. Web services remove many of the remaining barriers to the mainstream use of collaboration between organizations.

• Phase 3: Innovation— The innovation phase represents a level of capability, an accumulation of skills, as organizations explore how Web services can deliver business benefit both as an integration strategy and as a collaboration platform. The innovation phase will spark tremendous growth in Web services adoption as new business processes are created, and as new business models are devised. A new business landscape will emerge as organizations identify creative applications for Web services, and new ways of conducting business. This phase is significant as it represents a maturation of Web services in their practical, everyday usage by organizations.

• Phase 4: Domination— Finally, the domination phase is where organizations will establish themselves as market leaders through their ability to leverage Web services into new forms of a competitive advantage. The domination stage will be characterized by the separation of the leaders from the pack of competitors. This phase of Web services adoption will be based on high levels of accumulated skills and experience with Web services in driving the business models of the winners.

As we learned in Chapter 2, Web services standards are evolving and emerging at a rapid pace. The Web services standards framework breaks down the relevant standards into three levels—enabling, evolving, and emerging. The enabling standards are the classical Internet standards augmented by XML as a meta language. The evolving level includes the SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI standards, which have gained widespread support and are progressively being refined. The emerging level contains those remaining standards that are yet to gain widespread industry adoption.

The rate of Web services adoption will be determined somewhat by how evolving and emerging standards develop over time. If the technology and standards do not enable businesses to operate more effectively, then they will become a gating factor for Web services adoption. Assuming that standards continue to evolve rapidly, and reach maturity, then we will witness tremendous adoption of Web services through the integration, collaboration, innovation, and domination phases.

Web services will be increasingly used to enable business processes that drive the use of information-based business models. A real challenge for many organizations will be determining what business problems to attack first. We have devised a number of frameworks to help organizations target their first Web services projects, as well as help them determine where to expand their Web services efforts following their first successful pilot program.

We have considered Web services from a business strategy perspective, creating a high-level view of how business models can be modified or enhanced using Web services. This strategic view of Web services again reinforces our fundamental premise of business value driving Web services adoption, not technological sophistication. Web services will enable new business models to be crafted, as well as driving greater performance from existing business models.

We have used value chain analysis in our view of Web services. We feel that Web services possess real opportunities for organizations to take costs out of processes through the widespread use of Web services across the full spectrum of operations. Value chain analysis is one way to understand the ways in which Web services may shift the value equation for corporations, fundamentally altering the makeup of the core business processes, as well as the ways that participants in industry-value chains interoperate in industrywide processes and intercompany processes.

The strategic view of Web services shows how corporate strategy and the resultant business model can leverage Web services in innovative ways. Once corporate strategy and the business model have been infused with Web services, the organization and structures of the firm can be injected with Web services to enable the business model. Breaking down of the company’s value chain and the IT value chain will determine how costs can be reduced, how customers can be reached in new and innovative ways, and how suppliers can be tied into the organization to add new value.

Value chains have been around for a long time, but they have not been rigorously applied to the processes of information technology or to the processes that deliver information value to the business operations of a organization. This is a new application of value-chain analysis, and viewing Web services in this fashion provides a helpful lens in ascertaining the potential impact of Web services on the business and IT operations of an organization. This is especially important because many of the processes for creating and deploying Web services will be new for organizations. Therefore, the use of value chains may help shed some light on how the normal processes of information delivery will change.

We also have articulated a vertical market of how Web services may be adopted. Chapter 5 discusses how to begin analyzing the opportunities for using Web services to improve business processes. Based on the industry an organization competes in, as well as the company structure, a firm can leverage Web services in ways that enhance its ability to participate in an industry through its interaction with suppliers, customers, and other trading partners. In addition, this chapter examines the structure of the organization, which has bearing on its ability to compete within an industry. These forces of business have a definite impact on business processes that may benefit from the use of Web services.

Once the strategic and value chain and vertical market perspectives are understood, only then can organizations really begin the detailed planning for their first Web services project. Chapter 6 explores how a business can determine where to begin with Web services. Separating the hype from the reality of Web services is critical for realistically evaluating the organization’s ability to implement Web services in useful and beneficial ways. Clearly, evaluating an emerging technology must be done only after the appropriate due diligence has been performed.

In Chapter 7, we discuss the enterprise architecture and the case for implementation of an enterprise architecture using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. Having the necessary infrastructure and an appropriate hardware, software, and application architecture are critical for beginning the transition to Web services. Beyond the enterprise architecture discussion, Chapter 7 compares the virtues of Microsoft’s .NET versus the J2EE paradigm which will become increasingly irrelevant as the capabilities of Web services expand beyond internal integration and into true inter-enterprise collaboration, and then on to the remaining phases of Web services adoption. In the end, the programming methods used will be of lower importance if the standards assuring interoperability are adhered to and embraced.

Chapter 8 presents a vendor survey representing various categories of vendors and their respective approaches to Web services. In many respects, we are witnessing a turf war for Web services mind share, which is, of course, far ahead of the market’s readiness for Web services. There are early adopters exploring Web services and kicking the tires on emerging standards and technology, which we clearly encourage. However, in a tight economy and with discretionary spending constrained as it is, most organizations are not straying too far from their trusted vendors of choice—the platform providers and enterprise software vendors. This chapter represents a point-in-time, high-level overview of software vendors, and highlights the current vendor categories with account control of the corporate IT budgets— enterprise software vendors, platform providers, application server vendors, and the enterprise application integration vendors.

There is a battle looming with Web services as the prize, and how these vendors are positioning for battle is important for companies seeking to invest in Web services as early adopters. Of course, as with any emerging market space, there is the usual gaggle of new entrants and start-ups with hopes of making their own mark on the computing world, or at least with hopes of being acquired by the 800-pound gorillas. These new entrants fill the smaller gaps in the solutions offered by the existing established vendors, and in that way they are rapidly shaping the world of Web services, creating new categories of software, and providing new functions to facilitate the use of Web services.

Naturally, Darwinian selection will ensure that the fittest organizations survive—those that have compelling feature sets and unique value propositions will last, and those that are simply hoping to be acquired will not. This much is true: These niche vendors are providing a tremendous service in expanding the current capabilities of the existing software giants while ensuring that Web services remain vibrant and free from the inertia of those whose interests Web services may harm. The defense of their markets and control of corporate IT budgets will be the motivating force that drives legacy technology providers, and the new entrants will seek to dethrone them or be bought.

We now come to a set of recommendations for potential buyers and users of Web services. These are simple, concise thoughts to bear in mind as firms dive into the Web services fray:

• Embrace the idea of Web services and what they promise, yet maintain a healthy skepticism of vendor claims and industry hype.

• Always ask yourself, “What will Web services do for my business?”

• Then ask yourself, “How will Web services help me serve my customers?”

• Seek business value and ROI in Web services, but realize that in the fast-moving early stages of adoption, there may not be a clear payback in hard dollars, but there may be a hard payback (or cost avoidance) in the lessons learned.

• Put on a CEO and CIO hat for a moment, and ask yourself, how would you justify a Web services project to yourself? Is there business value to be found? Is there a business reason for the investment?

• Map out your organization’s value chain, and examine the areas where Web services can alter the way in which you deliver value to customers. Map out your IT value chain, and define how IT can provide better value to the business. This will ensure that a business perspective will be the foundation for your Web services activities.

• Watch the vendor community from a number of perspectives. Remember that the platform vendors and enterprise software vendors have motives that are different from the new entrants in the Web services market space. Some seek to change the balance of power in the IT industry, while some seek to maintain their control over the hearts and minds of IT executives. Anticipate how vendors will respond to Web services, and use this motive-based evaluation to decide who your partners will be for support of your Web services strategy and technology decisions.

• Maintain as many strategic and architectural degrees of freedom as possible. Avoid lock-in scenarios into which some vendors will try to box you. Web services are about interoperability and breaking down barriers to communication between applications within an enterprise, as well as across enterprise boundaries and corporate firewalls.

• Finally, get started with your Web services strategy and do not wait. This is the time to plan and experiment, and a bunker mentality now will cause negative consequences in the future. Experiment and learn about Web services as soon as possible to help ensure that a basic competency level exists within your organization. Finally, it will be critical to ensure that both business and IT leaders partner with each other to ensure that Web services are used to unlock and fully enable the business potential of your organization.