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Web services are like trainee staff

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Oct 2002 14:51 BST

But with a bottom-up system, the problem is, to pay back quickly, the new systems have to be picked up easily and brought into real use.

Web services-based systems will have to model ALL the processes associated with a business action. For example, when a furniture manufacturer receives a purchase order for some chairs, a whole string of questions must be answered. Does the buyer have enough credit to pay for the order? Can the manufacturer get all the parts? Has it got the manufacturing capacity to put them together?

Unfortunately, all these questions do not have yes or no answers. The parts might be available just after the deadline, or they might be available if a smaller customer's order is delayed. In that situation, a smart human sales person will start negotiating with the customer, perhaps offering a lower price for a few days' delay.

Web services, we are told, will be intelligent enough to handle this kind of negotiation. But will anyone trust them? "Web services will start out in an advisory role," says Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy. "Once the confidence level rises, they will be given more trust. They will be treated like new employees."

If you had a software agent to buy stuff on the Web for you (and this has been tried a lot of times) you might trust it to buy a book, but not a car or a house. The same goes for Web services in business, says Sutor.

In many ways this advisory role suits where Web services are now, since they are currently (reportedly) a bit slow, owing to the overheads of processing XML and the other new standards. By the time they are ready for more widespread use, they will hopefully run a bit faster.

So Web services is like a very capable new staff member. They will pick up your company's way of doing things, and gradually win the trust of existing employees. But they won't change your business overnight.

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