Anticipate business issues
Web services technology may seem complicated, but the business issues surrounding it are even more so, says Randy Heffner of Giga.
Connecting seamlessly with customers and partners raises a lot of potentially thorny questions that will require a lot more attention from IT managers than building the right technology skills.
Stay focused
Technology issues with Web services are relatively simple compared to the business issues, and therein lies the greatest challenge for IT managers: ensuring appropriate and robust Web services implementations by keeping development teams focused first on the right business issues. The basic idea of Web services is simple: use widely supported, Internet-friendly technologies to connect your systems with customers, partners, and suppliers--no matter what technology is used for the systems on their end. But the business issues mount rapidly.
With vertical industry standards for Web services yet to develop, which Web services design has the greatest likelihood of adoption by your partners? How will your systems use dynamic registry lookup without committing you to unknown, untrusted business partners? If your primary partner's Web service isn't available when you need it, do your business policies require you to retry after a time or fail-over immediately to an alternate service? How will you and your partners test Web service connections before going into production?
Will Web services be used simply to more efficiently do business that you already do, or will they be used to open new business models and opportunities? Will you implement Web services while standards are immature and adoption is thin or wait until more of your potential partners are Web-services ready?
Beyond building the right technology skills for their team, IT managers will have a much greater challenge leading teams to anticipate and address the new Web services spin on business and design issues.
