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Sat, Mar 17, 2007 12:39 EDT

Web Services: Kiss the Pig

Topic: Architecture

Blog: CIO Knowledge Space

Current Rating: 5 Comments: 4

Over the last year, Dr. Susy Chan, a fellow faculty member here at DePaul, and I have been interviewing larger firms in high tech and insurance industries about how they have adopted web services. What we are finding is underwhelming.

Unsurprisingly, for these larger and more complex firms, web services (WS) and service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption is following the path of least resistance. Firms are selecting their early WS and SOA projects based on a combination of limited risk, reasonable payoff and more importantly, steering clear of political landmines. Many initiatives did not involve direct or heavy customer contact (were internal to the firm) and were by no means any novel aggregation or recombination of business processes. More often than not the projects were tidier bundles of technology services.

While our research is still ongoing, we were struck by the fact that WS and SOA early adoption seems to follow traditional distributed computing adoption patterns. Most of the elements of WS and SOA are only understood by the technologists. Business leaders in the firms proceed without knowing how these new technical approaches can create advantage. WS and SOA are viewed as “geek” acronyms. None of this rose to the level of being a C-Level strategy.

One firm with a federated IT model with more power in the business units than at HQ found an innovative and political use for web services. The business unit championing this technology is using it to integrate disparate systems without directly challenging current organizational alignments, existing business processes and even the existing arrangement of technology services. The champions just wanted to get access to other business units’ content to try and do a better job of cross selling different products without any imperial entanglements such as having to implement a new system or needing to consolidate technology services. This firm is using web services to avoid the very same thing it is supposed to challenge – and improve.

In this regard, web services are lipstick on a pig. Useful lipstick, but lipstick nonetheless.

Are you willing to kiss this pig?

-Vince Kellen

Vince Kellen is Vice President for Information Services (CIO) at DePaul University and a member of the faculty for DePaul's computer science graduate program

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Average (1 vote)
5
 
 
Thu, Apr 19, 2007 11:28 EDT
Posted by: HemantPatel
Rating:

Perhaps this issue needs to be looked at from different angle. I am consulting for a Fortune 10 company, which has a minimal reuse, not because of unawareness of benefits of reuse, but because of organizational silos created by inter-team competition and lack of collaborative culture. Besuiness requirements portfolio exist at strategic level, but does not exist at tactical and operational level; resulting in minimal reuse or commonality.

Further the concept of "information management" as an integral part of SOA, is being recognized, but competitive work culture and showman-ship takes precedence over collaboration.

Perhaps a balance between "true" competitiveness and collaboration (ingrained thru coercive or non-coercive rewards) may solve those issues.

The success of SOA lies in the work culture!

 
Mon, Mar 19, 2007 12:26 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Brad
Rating:

I work for a large insurance company and have found that people have been oversold the concept of SOA. People focus too much on enabling services and processes and not enough on reuse. Reuse is only possible when you have processes, objects, services and business rules sharing the same data model. If not, no orchestration and way too many data transformations. I agree it is a hard concept to sell to my business units but they do understand the ability to keep costs down on a project and, for the most part, do not care how my teams delivers as long as we deliver.

 
Wed, Mar 21, 2007 9:46 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: MJ
Rating:

The example in the article rings a bell for me. In our mid-sized super-regional bank, we have more power in the business units than in the support or executive functions. Therefore, we are trying not to "re engineer" processes and tools, but collect some intelligence on pain points and weak spots in the current environment and utilize conventional web services to streamline parts of the process. Over time, the idea is to follow up these modest successes with other web services that do not exist or are even on the radar screen of the organization.

Like Brad, out initial "sell" will be the re-use of knowledge objects to accomplish similar goals and standardize some business approaches and foster an environment of innovation.

 
Fri, Mar 23, 2007 1:07 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: DT
Rating:

IMHO, WS and SOA still appear more hype than reality. Users and IT divisions alike have long understood the necessity of integrated systems and of adopting architectures that faciliate easy integration. The case for WS and SOA projects exists the most when an M&A occurs and two completely disparate architectures need to be consolidated, merged and re-presented. I for one, am not willing yet to 'kiss the pig'.

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