What every executive should know about Web services
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
If anyone in your company has recently purchased a new application—or integrated any existing applications—there's a good chance that Web services are present on your IT network. And that means your company needs to develop a plan for managing Web services.
Eric Marks, CEO of AgilePath Corp., a Newburyport, Mass.-based consulting firm that specializes in Web services, says effective management starts with construction of a service-oriented architecture—or SOA. That entails developing and enforcing standards for how Web services are built within an organization.
"Using common design standards means you are creating services that easily can be reused for multiple projects, which greatly increases the value of those assets," Marks says. A true SOA consists of a library of Web services that, at least theoretically, can be used to create new business processes. But the links won't work properly unless all of the services in an SOA adhere to the same design standards.
Marks says it is time to address these issues now, while Web services are in their infancy, to avoid problems similar to those faced in the past by companies integrating numerous disparate applications.
The easiest way, Marks says, is to make any chosen Web service adhere as much as possible to the design standards published by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), an industry consortium supported by major technology companies, including Microsoft and IBM. Any deviations or additions to those standards should be published and disseminated throughout the organization.
Even if WS-I standards are used, Marks maintains, IT managers must ensure everyone in the organization, who is likely to build a Web service, understands and follows the standards, and also purchase applications from vendors that follow the standards.
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