Your IT department is about to become the public face of your
business - are you ready?
A t first glance Web services are the reserve of the hardiest
geeks. The field spews out incomprehensible acronyms like a
dyslexic on speed. The technologies and standards are mostly at
their very early stages, with few tried and tested approaches in
place. Security, for the moment, seems to be stuck on as an
afterthought.
But there is little doubt that Web services technologies, which
promise to allow applications to share data via the Internet or
intranets, have massive weight behind them. The founding standards
- Soap, UDDI and XML - have the backing of IT giants such as
Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems, and these companies have
started shouting from the rooftops about the benefits.
Microsoft is promoting .net as a Web services technology, and is
committed to building it into its operating systems and
applications. Software suppliers promise a revolution in the way
businesses interact with customers, suppliers and other business
partners. They also promise that companies will be able to
integrate in-house applications more easily.
But look a little further into the future and Web services will not
just change the technologies IT departments use and the services
they can supply. It will create a seismic shift in the role of IT
departments within their companies. Until the advent of the
Internet, IT departments were only seen by the internal business -
customers and external partners would not want or need to know
about the running of the department.
As long as serious disasters were avoided no one outside the
business would need to know about how your IT department behaved,
the kind of people you employed and the technologies you used. Even
within the company, few were interested.
When the Internet came along IT units became more exposed. If Web
sites did not work, were ugly or did not serve your customers'
needs then you might lose some business - and suddenly the business
units became interested in IT.
Still, customers are not interested in how your Web site works,
what kind of technology you employ and the methods you use to build
it, as long as it does what they expect it to do.
But Web services will mean that your IT department could directly
affect your relationships with your customers and business
partners. The way you interact over the Internet will go far beyond
displaying sales information, enabling self-service or allowing
customers to order goods. For example, say you're a company that
makes car components. With Web services you will be able to flow
data, tagged using XML, directly into the design software used by
your customers, the car manufacturers. You will be able to receive
data describing new product requirements in the same way. This will
be done continuously and dynamically, without the user necessarily
knowing about it. That is the theory.
Seasoned IT professionals will spot a flaw in this cunning plan.
Who does your customer call when it doesn't work, when data goes
missing or is configured in the wrong way? The answer is your IT
department.
Your IT department will be required to give external customers the
support they need to run your Web services systems, in the same way
that software suppliers do now. And, just like a software supplier,
the quality of that support will have a direct impact on your
company's reputation and effectiveness in the market.
It also raises questions about legal liabilities. Who is
accountable should your customer's data be leaked by accident, or
through a flaw in your security? As IT becomes a critical means of
enabling business relationships, so your IT department could
determine whether those relationships succeed or fail.
None of this will happen overnight. Few companies are ready to
launch Web services of the kind described here, but some have made
a start and those that succeed will gain competitive advantage.
Slowly, but surely, the IT department will become key to your
company's reputation. Already market analysts are taking a growing
interest in corporate IT strategies when they value company stock.
It is a subject you should raise if the finance department starts
taking the knife to your IT spending plans.
Web services standards explained
Soap
Simple Object Access Protocol - a message-based
protocol based on XML for accessing services on the Web. Initiated
by Microsoft, IBM and others, it employs XML syntax to send text
commands across the Internet using HTTP
UDDI
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration -
an industry initiative for a universal business registry of Web
services. Led by Ariba, IBM, Microsoft and others, UDDI is designed
to enable software to automatically discover and integrate with
services on the Web
XML
Extensible Markup Language - an open standard for
describing data from the World Wide Web Consortium, is used for
defining data elements on a Web page and business-to-business
documents and employs a similar tag structure to that used in HTML.