Plan your move into Web services
SOAP and other Web services standards may be better every day, but diving into them too soon may be as fun as jumping into a cold shower on a chilly winter morning. Although it's probably too early for most companies to go full bore into Web services, there are a few things you can do to ease your own efforts.
- Don't SOAP yourself up unnecessarily: Don't listen to the vendors. Web services are still evolving, you have not lost out to competitors by not implementing them yet, and you don't have to rush into them early just to say you got there first.
Hold off for a while, watch the experience of others, and don't be afraid to tell vendors to go away until they can offer more than technological novelty.
- Start very, very small: No matter how enthusiastic the vendors are, for now Web services are going to come into most organisations at a trickle rather than flood. Pilot testing in a small part of the business is always a good idea, but it's doubly so when the potential pitfalls and benefits of Web services are still becoming apparent even to those that build them.
- Choose your partners carefully: Web services vendors may have worked to make the transition as seamless as possible, but most companies are going to need outside help to ensure a smooth implementation.
Given the technologies' novelty, it will be some time before internal developers have climbed the learning curve enough to make it work effectively.
Look to traditional consulting and implementation partners, who have close ties with vendors and have been busy building internal Web services expertise, to help with strategic planning and provision of the skills to get you where you want to go.
Working with .NET experts at Avanade, says Taronga Zoo IT and planning manager Jenny Vasseleu (see sidebar), "has made the world of difference to us; we're quite comfortable going ahead with these projects knowing we've got that support."
- Building your own skills: Once your pilot program is successful, the right amount of trumpeting should gradually win more interest from both technical and business interests.
Choose carefully, but work to rapidly expand your internal skills base so that Web services can grow organically throughout the organisation.
- Involve business leaders: One of the biggest potential mistakes when implementing Web services is to treat them as a technology upgrade alone.
The best Web services implementations will use technology to provide easily accessible hooks into complex business functions; scoping, redefining, and delivering those business functions requires the intimate involvement of business leaders who can step away from the technology to identify areas of potential improvement.
- Aim for a quick ROI: Web services are new technologies, and as such management will be rightfully sceptical of vendors' guarantees. Try scoping any implementation to cover just one or two specific business processes whose improvement will deliver measurable benefits within around six months.
Larger, more ambitious projects--particularly those that integrate commodity services from outside providers--will flow from there.
- Stay disciplined: You can implement Web services in a small way or go the full hog. Either way, it's critical to manage the project with stringent configuration management, change management, project management, version management and other facets of quality control.
"You need to have a lot of internal rigour around the way you manage the architecture," advises Avanade's Chrimes. "Web services don't give you the right not to do standard IT maintenance and methodology, and they don't give you the right to skip business risk management either."
- Don't spread your wings too fast: One of Web services' mooted promises is the ability to seamlessly link application modules over the Web.
The challenge of finding and assessing various modules--the realm of still nascent UDDI and WSDL--is a big enough problem. But even when that's possible, you can still suffer business interruption unless you've adequately considered strategies for managing unexpected downtime, Internet congestion, and other issues that aren't anywhere near as problematic over private networks. Such issues will seriously hamper broader Web services deployment until the Net's underlying technology improves.
- Expect to write code: New development tools may hide a lot of the pain of developing Web services, but even they cannot eliminate the need for you to write and test code-lots of it.
Vendors will tell you Web services can do OO development one better by allowing reuse of previously built modules, but who really wants to rely on code that's months or years old? Strive for continuous improvement in your software, and don't get lazy just because the tools make it possible.
- Web services will not cure cancer: They won't automatically fix your application infrastructure, either. For the near future, Web services will remain complex, ill-defined, ambiguously implemented, and subject to disproportionate amounts of vendor politicking and hype. Don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed.
"There is no silver bullet," cautions Rational Software chief scientist Grady Booch. "Bullets aren't even the right ammunition to be using."
