Simplifying integration
The promise of simplified integration won't come without a price. While Web services will reduce the costs of integration and reliance on contractors, they will require new skills from IT personnel. To succeed, says Daryl Plummer of Gartner, IT departments will need to build trust by solving security and privacy problems.
New skills needed
The impact on IT departments comes in how this delivery of software-as-services can shift costs, simplify process integration, and change the balance of skills in the organization. The reliance on Web services standards simplifies integration because it reduces the number of options necessary for connecting systems together. This does not reduce cost and time of integration efforts to zero, but it can enable an IT department to improve its systems integration, rather than having to rely on outside contractors to do integration on a time-and-materials basis.
Although the potential benefits of Web services are great, the risks of moving to a service-oriented world also exist. Service providers must be given a certain amount of trust, and with no frameworks around with which to build trust, this can be a risky proposition.
Therefore, the primary services that are used will come from private communities of companies trading with each other. This means that companies will be reluctant to extend their catalogs and business processes into a public domain for quite some time. IT departments will have to solve the problems of security, trust, privacy, and sourcing when selecting which services should be used. Furthermore, IT departments are not accustomed to service-oriented systems, which require a flexible, dynamic mind-set--much like client/server and Internet computing did at their start.
Web services require a rethinking of systems--if not a redesign. For enterprises to succeed at Web services, they need to embrace the concept of SODA (services-oriented development of applications). SODA requires developers to work with dynamic modules of services rather than static code.
