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July 26, 2002

Process of Improvement

Business process management is among the most exciting sectors in strategic software — and Web services makes it even more so

by Barry Murphy

Continued from Page 1

Respondents do recognize XML, SOAP, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Connector Architecture, UDDI, and WSDL as having large roles in Web services strategies. XML is clearly the foundational technology upon which Web services will rest. The standard was nearly a unanimous choice, indicating that it's a "must have" component of Web services. The majority (53 percent) of organizations taking part in the survey have begun to enable their applications to leverage information represented in XML. Respondents also seem to grasp the importance of SOAP — 70 percent indicate that they've already begun to enable business applications with SOAP interfaces or will do so in the next 12 months.

The Infrastructure of Web Services

Organizations are taking varied approaches to the uncertain infrastructure requirements. Many organizations, 41 percent of respondents, are creating a mixed (J2EE and Microsoft-compliant) environment for deployment. In contrast, 36 percent of organizations have committed to a Microsoft-centric environment, and 16 percent have committed to Unix and J2EE.

Whether they're clearly understood or not, Web services are here to stay — only 25 percent of survey respondents have no plans to implement Web services. Importantly, 39 percent plan to implement Web services within the project area of BPM, solidifying the relationship between the two. Other project implementation areas for Web services include enterprise portals (53 percent), content management (37 percent), enterprise application integration (EAI; 39 percent), CRM (29 percent), and e-commerce (39 percent).

Many organizations (34 percent) are uncertain about when they'll begin using Web services for distributed processing of large computational tasks. For those that do know, the timeframe is quick: By 2003, most companies will be utilizing Web services for distributed processing.

Where Web Services Fit

Companies are also beginning to think about where Web services fit within their organizations. Although there's no one clear department or initiative with which Web services fit, the most popular were enterprise portals (21 percent), BPM (15 percent), and EAI (15 percent). It's clear from these responses that companies are looking for EAI to deliver information, whether in a portal, in the context of a process, or among applications.

Web services are widely viewed as a means to extend existing investments in information repositories, applications, and business processes. Therefore, you can make some assumptions about where Web services will be applied first, based on what organizations have in place that may be shared internally and externally.

Over two-thirds of respondents (70 percent) have a business portal project underway. It makes sense that these organizations will use Web services to integrate information, applications, and processes into these portals, rather than building hard-wired portlets that must be recoded each time an application or process changes. In addition, portal deployments are reaching more frequently across the firewall. As this trend continues, the business portal will become the place where workers build, publish, access, and use Web services.

Nearly half the survey respondents have a BPM project underway in their organizations. Process integration is the next focal point for those companies that have successfully integrated content and applications in their computing environments (often through corporate portals). As more organizations codify and modify their internal processes and those shared with external value chain members, they'll use Web services to integrate those processes with content and applications, providing best practice business context to the information used by their knowledge workers.

Early Evolution and Impediments

Survey respondents indicate that early Web services initiatives will revolve around a select few areas. Application integration, whether inside one corporate location or across several locations via VPN, will be an early driver of Web services initiatives. In fact, respondents see cost-effective integration of internal applications as the primary benefit to be derived from Web services. When companies are comfortable with the results of those initiatives, they'll likely move on to exposing APIs and services to business partners over the Web and subscribing to commercially available Web services.

Of course, there will be obstacles as companies begin to test the Web services waters. Respondents felt that several features were missing from Web services offerings. Process management standards, distributed authentication (between Web services and business objects), quality of service metrics and monitoring, nonrepudiation (transactional integrity and delivery guarantees), and the ability to syndicate more than data and content are chief among the features that users would like to see in a more holistic Web services offering.

Web Services Press On

Despite the lack of a coherent definition of Web services, organizations are taking green-field approaches to implementation, choosing to use internal resources to deploy Web services (77 percent) over using business partners with greater experience (36 percent). However, 19 percent of respondents consider lack of experience in building services-oriented architecture as being the largest obstacle to implementation. Other perceived obstacles to Web services implementations include multiple standards implementation methods (18 percent), lack of a business case (15 percent), and the change required in organizational culture (18 percent).

However, the lack of consensus about Web services isn't deterring implementation initiatives. Predictably, organizations are taking different approaches to accounting for Web services. One third of companies see Web services as being a cost center within their organizations, one third see Web services as being a profit center, and the final third are cost-neutral at this point.

As they press on with Web services initiatives, companies will use a variety of metrics to measure the success of their implementations. Organizations will be looking at how a Web services architecture helps them utilize existing infrastructure and software assets (43 percent), use internal development resources (38 percent), reduce deployment time (40 percent) and initial deployment costs (25 percent), and lower total cost of ownership (18 percent).

The largest group of respondents (23 percent) expects to spend less than $100,000 on Web services projects within the next three years, and the next largest group (18 percent) anticipates spending less than $250,000 during the same time period. Spending is generally proportional to the size of an IT project, so we must assume that these groups envision starting with small initiatives. However, one of the promises of Web services is the extension of existing IT assets as opposed to wholesale replacement of systems. In many instances, deploying Web services won't force new investments in hardware or applications and will require only limited spending on XML and SOAP coding.

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History teaches us that most projects come in over budget, often because not all costs were anticipated up front. In the case of Web services development and deployment, it's easy to overlook necessary initial expenditures such as developer training and third-party architectural services, as well as recurring costs, such as maintenance of Web services components. Many firms will find that their original projections for Web services spending were overly optimistic or simply ill informed.

The Twain Shall Meet

When evaluating BPM and Web services technologies to solve problems associated with streamlining processes and integrating information systems, it's important to note the distinction between the two. Web services participate in business processes, but don't provide process intelligence. The XML/SOAP protocols of Web services don't incorporate process context, and Web services don't carry application logic. Web services won't replace BPM functionality; rather, Web services will enhance the ability of BPM solutions to provide real value.

Barry Murphy [bjm@delphigroup.com] is a senior analyst at Boston-based Delphi Group. He leads consulting engagements, conducts reasearch, and lectures about software tools and applications for BPM, Web services, and knowledge management technologies.