System Transformation Portal

Plan for Transition To Web Services

By William M. Ulrich
Originally appeared in Computerworld Magazine August 20th, 2001

Information Technology is leaving the era of custom coding and entering the era of Web services.

If that doesn't seem like a big deal, consider this: Until Ford exploited the assembly-line model to mass-produce cars, most people didn't own one. Web services will have as profound an impact on information management as the assembly line had on the auto industry. IT will be able to deliver more services of greater value more quickly and cost-effectively - if it plans accordingly.

Web services establish an environment in which developers build systems using reusable components, in stark contrast to writing systems from scratch. Components are self-contained units of business logic and data that can be assembled into applications. Components' owners maintain their functionality. The components are accessible in-house or from external sources via the Web.

A Web services environment streamlines the time it takes to deliver new business capabilities, standardizes results and lowers application management costs. The speed and reliability associated with using standardized components to process many functions will exponentially increase IT's value to a business.

Yet transforming IT from a handcrafted environment to a Web services model is a huge challenge that will take years because IT has focused on handcrafted applications for decades. But with requisite tools and architectures beginning to take hold, companies need to deploy a Web services strategy that recognizes the impact of Web services and drives the needed projects to make it a reality.

Basic support for Web services is emerging. Various vendors offer development tools and methods to facilitate the creation of components and the distribution of components and services across Web-enabled architectures.

But deploying these architectures is just the first step toward Web services. Companies must also change the way they address collaboration, governance and legacy systems - and this won't happen overnight.

Collaboration facilitates the reuse of components, but it's rare. For example, one company had several development teams building components, none of which would share its components with the other teams. This is the wrong approach. A company's executive team must establish a collaborative work environment and build it into the corporate culture and governance structure. This may mean changing how IT works with business units, how the units work with one another and how a company works with business partners.

Legacy systems are another roadblock. Hundreds of billions of lines of legacy code perform key business functions, so identifying, extracting, consolidating and redeploying them are prerequisites to building a viable set of reusable components. Legacy componentization will let many industries break free of the legacy application architectures that limit new business opportunities.

Imagine the benefits a phone company could realize if it were to capture and consolidate business and data intelligence from redundant billing systems and redeploy this functionality as reusable components. Developers could deploy valuable business functionality in new, Web-enabled applications and provide customers with Web access to billing and related information. Entire service departments, responsible for, say, customer inquiries, could be streamlined or put to better use.

Web services can take businesses to new levels of productivity, even when deployed internally as a first step. But this will occur only if IT pursues a systematic approach to get there.