Over the past five years, in researching and writing case studies on more than a dozen multicompany efforts to deploy and profit from IT, I noticed sharp differences between those that involved people and those that aimed to get people “out of the loop” via Web-services technologies. IBM’s midrange B2B-ordering effort provided an excellent opportunity to analyze and understand why this was the case, and to explore whether the great enthusiasm around Web services was justified. To write the case study summarized here, I interviewed more than 20 people at IBM and four of its European distributors, and reviewed data on project timing and outcomes. I also immersed myself in the literature about the impact and evolution of Web-services technologies, and in relevant work in computer science and