The IT Strategy Letter
May 19, 2003
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Bookwatch: Loosely Coupled--The Missing Pieces of Web Services is still new and therefore somewhat hard to find. Here are some tips as of today:
Review of the Week:
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Gartner Says: Pull the Plug on Passport. "The recently discovered security flaw in Passport will likely delay demand for that service, and other single sign-on services, until next year, the analyst firm says...Gartner says the Passport vulnerability will delay strong demand for such identity services until the end of 2004." [Source: InternetWeek.com] My take? Forget demand -- there isn't any, at least among consumers,
who have repeatedly shown they don't see any benefit from this technology.
Single sign-on is already a big deal within the intranet, where
Passport is irrelevant. In retail ecommerce federated identity may
get shoved down their throats by vendors, but I don't see it, even
by late 2004. |
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More Confusion: SOAs, OO, and Web Services. I don't want to pick on anyone in particular, but this article in the Australian Computerworld is typical of the misunderstandings that are still being propagated by the uninformed press regarding SOAs and loose coupling. Let's see if I can help...
According to the article, Roy Schulte of Gartner expects the emergence
of standards for event processing to appear beginning in 2005 and
for complex event processing (CEP) systems to become mainstream
in 2007. (I predict 2004 for the former, but I have a track record
of being overly optimistic about such things.) David Luckham, a
co-founder of Rational Software and author of Power
of Events, predicted that CEP "will start creeping into web
services, middleware and application servers in 2005. By 2008, he
foresees the emergence of CEP standards, languages and complex event-pattern
search engines. Ubiquity of CEP will come in 2012, he forecasted."
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Enterprise Software's End. Phil Wainewright linked to this column by Paul Strassmann, who has the credentials to support his opinions. In addition to the passages quoted by Phil, consider these: Web services make it possible to unburden the CIO of an organization from housekeeping and allow him to make IT a source of competitive advantage. Through loose coupling of services, the Web environment is more suited to the prevailing conditions where mergers, acquisitions and supplier and customer collaboration call for interapplication interoperability in a matter of days instead of years, as currently dictated by ERP initiatives.I agree with this, except with regard to web services making IT a source of competitive advantage. As web services become commonplace, the period of competitive advantage will end, to be replaced by a world in which not using web services is a disadvantage. Think of FAX and email. Do they give your organization a competitive advantage? Where would you be without them?
Why then is the adoption of Web services so slow? Organizations can shift to Web service-based integration only after they restructure the way IT is managed and shift attention from computing to communications. They must also accept a move away from ownership of the means of computing and be willing to purchase most of their transactions as a service. The comment regarding ownership is right on, but if you take a
step back, I think you'll see that the move to web services isn't
slow at all. The vendors and standards bodies are rolling out their
deliverables faster than at any time in the past. But they're not
done -- many pieces are still missing -- so most IT shops can't
move forward with large-scale projects just yet. |
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BPEL4WS
vs. WSCI. According to John Taschek in eWeek, the battle
for a web-services choreography specification is over, with BPEL4WS
having been declared the winner over WSCI. John says WSCI "...was
officially left stranded when Microsoft, IBM and BEA released BPEL
to OASIS in mid-April, this killing any competing choreography standard."
Look for more on this important topic in future newsletters. |
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A
Framework for SOA. CDBI offers this framework for planning
SOA implementation, with candidate deliverables for architects,
and invite feedback. They've coined the phrase "Business Services
Bus" to tie together services into logical sets that reflect the
structure of businesses. Good ideas, but instead of "the logical
grouping and design of each bus ensures that there is minimal duplication
plus uniformity in naming, ordering, and types of parameters" I'd
like to see them focus on more loosely coupled concepts. Specifically,
the functions of a department should be expressed in a set of coarse-grained
documents and XML schema. Most Enterprises Also Failed With Components. Also on CBDI Forum, author David Sprott (I believe) wrote. "Enterprises are discovering many of the core issues that inhibited use of software components apply equally to Web Services. Is this a reason for avoiding Web Services, or are there ways to over come them?" His answers are (to summarize):
Doesn't make sense to me. If you're going to implement web services
that aren't business critical, then they're probably rather simple
and may not even need a real business case. More likely, you'll
be using web services in these situations as just the "right way"
to accomplish an integration task. It's when you implement services
that are truly business critical that you need both a robust deployment
platform as well as a justifiable business case. I refer to these
as "complex" web services, and they're those that also require some
degree of strategic planning. |
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Loosely
Coupled from Ecademy Press. My new
book is being published by Ecademy Press in a special edition
for members of The Ecademy,
headquartered in the U.K. |
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The IT Strategy Letter is published weekly by RDS Strategies LLC. Much -- but not all -- of the content is published earlier in Doug Kaye's weblogs.
This newsletter is governed by a Creative Commons License.
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