CIOs should govern Web services now
By Bobby Cameron -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2002 12:00:00 AM
Companies are deploying Web services aggressively to tie together internal and external business processes, with 41 percent in some stage of rolling them out, and 11 percent already in production. But current information technology (IT) governance will mismanage Web services.
Even though most companies anticipate little difficulty managing Web services—given that most are awaiting the maturation of standards—Web services deployments have a free-form nature that poses challenges. In a complacent environment, use of Web services will proliferate beyond the reach of IT's normal approach to software development, deployment, and operation. Why? Any developer can build an interface using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP); any manager can fund it; and any application can call the interface. This free-form growth will result in three kinds of negative impact.
First, duplicated development efforts will create excessive costs and non-reusable or indecipherable code. Tiny two-hour Web services development tasks—budget approval, version control, for instance—will sneak past IT's governance radar. The CIOs that Forrester spoke with don't anticipate Web services projects to run amuck because they don't recognize the power of this simple technology, which is akin to HTML Web sites in the mid-1990s.
Second, the quality of code will decline. The CIOs we interviewed feel confident about architecture controls such as code reviews of call sequences and table structures. But Web services can't be handled the same way. Entire sets of variables that come with application programming interfaces will simply be left out of what is returned from Web services calls. For example, a single Web service call could return both an order from a Commerce One operations site and an associated purchase requisition from an Oracle receivables app—while inadvertently omitting critical synchronization data like time-stamps.
Finally, misunderstood interfaces will cause operational errors. When developers publish Web services, IT loses control over how business people interpret and disperse them. By misconstruing Web services data, the untrained business user can cause misfires—like providing suppliers with inventory levels based on the start of a manufacturing run instead of the end.
Smart CIOs will adopt new governance practices for Web services now. They must begin by staying ahead of the techies. The CIO will assign heads of software development and systems maintenance to harness the efforts of developers tempted to build Web services. To succeed, these managers will do three things.
First, managers will give their internal hackers ready and early access to the new toys—to both direct and encourage the creative developers. Second, development managers will grow developer understanding and buy-in by requiring developers to attend early and frequent training. These short sessions will address the building, publishing, and maintenance of Web services as part of a business framework.
Finally, teams will inspire focus on Web services issues through design reviews—producing developer ownership of Web services quality by helping the techies recognize the importance of this quality to their success. To make this value clear, development managers will include the architecture team in ongoing design reviews.
But oversight must develop teeth. CIOs will assign an architecture team to oversee Web services. The architecture team should also have veto power over purchases of Web services technologies like Universal Description, Discovery, & Integration servers and SOAP development tools.
As their final task, CIOs will see that Web services designs fit business users. IT staff responsible for managing relationships with internal business users will take steps to effectively and safely share Web services. This business liaison group will begin by ensuring cross-functional Web services project teams.
Finally, IT will make it easy to generate new Web services. Nothing will breed Web services outside of the CIO's control faster than tough-to-get-at Web services resources. To respond quickly to demand from both IT and business users, CIOs should set up a "swat team" under the apps development head. This group will ensure adequate resource availability while metering the flow of new Web services to match growth in requests for the technology.
