The Business Case for Web Services
Today’s IT executive doesn’t have the time or the budget to invest in new technologies that fail to offer rapid business value. It is important, therefore, for managers to understand both the short-term and long-term value of Web Services.
They must be able to cut through the hype surrounding this new approach to computing and understand how their organizations can use Web Services today to reduce the cost of integration in the enterprise. Even more important, however, they must understand the strategic value of Web Services.The strategic value that Web Services offer is in the form of business agility: IT infrastructures flexible enough to enable companies to leverage changing business environments for competitive advantage. To build such agile infrastructures, organizations must build Service-oriented architectures, leveraging Web Services strategically across their IT environment.
Service-oriented architectures, while easy to conceive in theory, are difficult to build in practice. Companies should take a step-by-step approach that requires both a new perspective on IT architecture as well as a Web Services management solution that enables the construction of Service-oriented architectures.