There is one vital difference between Web Services and other ‘mould-breaking’ information technologies of recent years; Web Services can actually pay their own way.
The adoption of Web Services technology offers businesses a massive long-term strategic advantage. But the same technology can also be used to save money and make money in the short term — in some cases so much so that the technology will have paid for itself long before its strategic long-term benefits have been felt.
As always with a new information technology that has the potential to change the business world, industry commentators are split neatly between those who are hyping it to the heavens and those who advise waiting to see if it’s just another passing fad.
The sceptics point out that the full promise of Web Services cannot be realised until open standards are fully developed, and the Web becomes secure, fast and reliable enough to support exchange of mission-critical data and applications in an ‘on-demand’ manner. Until then, they believe, buying into the technology would be little more than an expensive knee-jerk reaction to vendor hype.
Let us be clear; the vision of a futuristic ‘service grid’ where dynamic machine-to-machine communication is the backbone of global trade is just that — futuristic, perhaps years away. But with the right approach, adopting Web Services technology right now could yield such a level of savings that a return on investment could be achieved in a matter of months, particularly for large enterprises.
The key to doing this is to broaden the scope of thinking with regards to the underlying technology and where and how it can be applied. Most discussions concentrate on the XML standards, the idea of small applets such as a credit checking service, plugged easily into new applications, and as a slightly improved solution to the labour and cost intensive EAI projects that corporates wrestle with. This is all well and good, but not likely to get the CFO reaching for his chequebook in a hurry.
However, if we look under the bonnet at the underlying technology engine, we see a platform capable of enabling the ‘service-oriented architecture’, the term used to describe the on-demand framework for Web Services. As its name implies, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) focuses on making resources available as a service, in that they can be consumed immediately but only as and when needed, and without the capital cost and operational hassle of the acquisition, build and set-up phases. The architecture creates an environment in which consistent, open standards are used to define how each resource can be ‘plugged in’ and service-enabled.
This model and technology, applied internally within the organisation, can improve the overall commercial effectiveness of a company’s operations at the ‘building block’ level — how it defines and executes business processes, and how these processes are able to achieve their objective through manipulating resources without human intervention.
It is this exchange of human effort and capital acquisition for automatic transaction and ‘on demand’ usage that fuels the vision of Web Services extending across the global trading environment — but they can also be used for very down-to-earth and practical purposes right here and now.
A fairly logical place for the IT team to implement this approach first is the IT environment itself, so that the supply of applications, infrastructure and maintenance is delivered via the SOA, improving service delivery to internal users, increasing performance and resilience, and decreasing costs.
Some simple examples, restricted just to the IT area, reveal areas where savings are available:
1. IT administration: Consider how the minutes and hours add up for systems administrators engaged in the routine tasks of setting up and maintaining simple IT resources for company users. It may only take a few minutes to set up an email account, but what about network access, accounts for multiple business systems, numerous password support issues, installing new software, ordering and setting up laptops and so on. Even a minimal estimate of two hours sysadmin work per staff member per year across all these functions would cost a global enterprise with 50,000 employees more than $5m a year in labour costs alone — and it is my guess that for the typical enterprise the routine IT load per employee is far in excess of the two hours cited above. Yet Web Services technology, applied to the sysadmin area, can effectively automate allthese repetitive tasks.
2. Downtime costs: It is only natural with this level of administrative work being performed by humans that errors occur. Even a simple mistake in setting up an email account or laptop keeps a worker offline for hours, losing productivity. This is difficult to quantify financially, so perhaps instead consider misconfiguration in an area such as DNS. Something as tiny as a comma instead of a full stop when keying in this data has a total and devastating result: complete unavailability of a web page or even the whole site, during which downtime direct sales revenues are being lost and unknown damage is being done to the brand and reputation of the company.
Automation of operations in these areas removes the need for human involvement, eliminating the original costs, the errors caused, and the resulting knock-on secondary costs. (Consider the fact that DNS lookup failures have been analysed by Keynote as the second most common reason for website failures, accounting for 29 per cent of failed Web page downloads. A Gartner analysis estimated that as much as 40 per cent of infrastructure downtime is caused by operator error.)
And remember, this is just thinking about Web Services technology as applied to the very narrow field of internal IT administration; a moment’s thought will throw up scores of other internal areas (invoice and credit control processing, payroll, training, maintenance schedules, personnel administration, health and safety routines etc) where the technology can be used to achieve concrete savings. Yet this investment — of such great short-term benefit — is also creating the same platform that will be able to take advantage of the strategic business opportunities offered by XML Web Services in the medium to long term.
Furthermore, the fun doesn’t stop here. This ‘IT process engine’ enables the organisation to be more effective at acquiring resource from suppliers. With all manners of IT available as a consumable network resource, from storage to applications, ‘orchestrating’ together a complete technology platform from external components is not a completely impossible task, and offers numerous benefits.
Instead of buying in expensive top-down enterprise applications with long install times and white-knuckle learning curves, the IT department can begin to deliver user solutions by working on a bottom-up basis, within a modular framework for finding and consuming functional resource automatically as and when it is needed.
A host of benefits… but in the here and now, it is the nitty-gritty of cash saved that makes the most compelling case for the adoption of Web Services technology. Youknow when you persuade the Board to buy into the technology that what you’re doing is securing the long-term future of the enterprise but you can sell it to them by pointing to this year’s bottom line. The bean counters will love you — and later on, you can reveal your true identity as the visionary who saved the CEO’s bacon by building him the technology of the future when he wasn’t looking…
First appeared at Line56.com
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Neil McEvoy is CEO of the Genesis forum (http://www.webservices-strategy.com), an
industry initiative of Service Oriented Architecture vendors describing the
business benefits of their technologies. He is the Chief Architect of the On
Demand framework, the platform for autonomic business models that match demand
and supply perfectly. Neil provides unique consultancy solutions to enterprise
end-users and vendor suppliers customised to deliver ROI within the On Demand
market. He can be reached at http://www.ondemand-strategy.com
