Comment Articles

Web services are like trainee staff

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Oct 2002 14:51 BST

When you take on a new staff member, how quickly do you expect results? If it's a senior person, you might see some quick benefit to the share price, but it will be months before they understand the company enough to make changes -- and disaster if they try to change things before then. If it's a junior person, you get smaller results -- but you get them quicker.

When you look at Web services, remember that they are not the IT equivalent of a new CEO, or even a new CFO. They represent a new and very hard-working junior admin person, but one with a lot of potential.

The marketing people say Web services are ready to use because the standards work is more or less done. Now, this is as much of an exaggeration as you'd expect from marketing people. What it means in practice is that the basic SOAP/UDDI/WSDL trio of standards is solid, and other essential stuff like security and business process modelling is at least underway.

Like most of the other significant stuff, security standards will go through the influential OASIS group, and there should be some sort of draft next year.

But with that proviso, I'd say that Web services are ready to use. There are early adopters using them, and building your own security onto the system is inconvenient but worth doing if there is some real advantage you can see from Web services in the end.

The problem is that, to get that advantage, you have to get your people to use those Web services-based systems.

And this is where I think it is going to get interesting. Because here we have a very human issue.

Web services will not reproduce the colossal white elephant systems of the past. There won't be a huge investment, long lead-time, big bang approach (like the EDI systems of the 1980s, or the EAI engines of the 90s). They will be put together in small, manageable, chunks from the bottom up. The things that get made will be the ones with a quick payback.