For corporate computing, the big story of the new millennium has been Web services. As the excitement around the Y2K “crisis” and e-commerce business models faded just after the turn of the century, enthusiasm started to build for this technology, which is a set of tools that make it easier for applications to talk to each other. In other words, Web services install the plumbing required for information systems to interact without human involvement. An important aspect of Web services is that they work as well between companies as within them. Just as the Internet and the World Wide Web led to a huge change in how people interact with distant applications (for example, the applications at Amazon.com), so the Internet and Web services hold out the promise of drastically changing how distant applications interact with each other.See sidebar

But how real is this promise? Will Web services be a truly disruptive innovation that revolutionizes how companies interact? Or will they turn out to be the latest in a series of technologies, developed and promoted by the highly entrepreneurial IT industries, that fizzle when they hit the real world? (You may remember CASE tools and Internet “push” technology.1)

The answer is that they will be neither. They will be highly useful, but not quickly or obviously disruptive; in fact, they will reinforce existing relationships rather than catalyze new ones. What’s more, the application-integration challenges that remain unaddressed by Web services are the really difficult ones and can only be overcome by the work of managers and leaders, not technologists or consortia.

The Promise of Web Services

At least five different communities — software vendors, computer scientists, technology analysts, business pundits and industry consortia — are currently generating enthusiasm about Web services, which are defined here as open, Internet-era standards for exchanging data between applications.

“With the Web services architecture, tight couplings will be replaced with loose couplings,” assert management consultant John Hagel and computer scientist John Seely Brown. “Because everyone will share the same standards for data description and connection protocols, applications will be able to talk freely with other applications, without costly reprogramming. This will make it much easier for companies to shift operations and partnerships in response to market or competitive stimuli.” Hagel and Brown further conclude that “Over time, the location of particular capabilities — whether inside or outside the walls of any given company — will become less important