Every year about this time, I like to take a moment to reflect on things. Some people make resolutions, but I've never been very good at that, so instead I try to take a look forward and see where the year is going to take us, and what we need to accomplish.

I visit many companies in a variety of industries during the course of a year. While there are significant technology differences from industry to industry, perhaps the most common themes for organizations today are integration and agility.

Notice that neither of these themes is innately technical in nature. Rather, they reflect high-level desires - and frustrations - for the ability of business processes to be as adaptable in software as they are in the business world.

Integration is one of the most elusive goals of any organization. At a high level it seems easy to imagine the company as one large knowledge and information repository that can be tapped to answer any question necessary to make business function properly. But dig deeper and you find that one large repository is actually hundreds of systems, applications, files, and databases, some of which were written decades ago and haven't been updated since because the impact on the business of changing these legacy black boxes has become too severe. These systems run the business, but the business can't change them, either because they're written in some obscure language that uses shorthand and meaningless variable names to implement business rules, or because corporate memory has been erased and no one really knows how the programs do their work anymore. There's no way to make these monoliths interoperate with other programs, no way to get to the mythical single system of record. And so, instead of a vast repository of knowledge we have islands of inefficiency.

And that's how we get to the desire for agility. Corporations need to be able to react to changing business climates. Be it governmental action such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or the Patriot Act, or market pressure from large customers such as Wal-Mart, business as usual means constant change. Businesses that can manage this changing environment survive and flourish. Businesses that cannot cope simply cease to exist.

The Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" highlighted some of the problems with trying to use technology to gain operational advantage, but the reality of life is that IT does matter - it's part of every corporation. While IT may not provide a competitive edge (a claim I'd dispute myself) any longer, it's a requirement for any large business.

And that's why Web services are important. The basic components of Web services (XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) are the common plumbing that the industry has needed for over 40 years. I recently heard Web services described as the RCA jack of the IT industry - a simple, widespread standard allowing connectivity and modularity among software. And it's true. With the basics of Web services we can unite disparate systems quickly and effectively, without having to mortgage the company to pay the price of implementation.

Beyond the basics is where we may see companies addressing operational agility. The combination of Web services security, Web services management, and the standards for transactional integrity will allow the construction of long-running, secure, shared Web services. By utilizing standard connection mechanisms corporations can "wire" together their systems and finally achieve a measure of integration at a price that's cost effective.

But the real efficiencies await businesses that realize that true agility is seldom hardwired - for businesses to be truly agile it must be as simple to change a process in software as it is to issue a corporate policy directive.

And that's where Web services and business process management provide the needed technology. Web services, with abstract, business-oriented APIs reflecting business processes rather than technology processes, can be combined, redefined, and constantly adapted to changing business conditions. Business process management finally provides the tools and mechanisms for creating the agile organization.

And that's why Web services are important.

About the Author
Sean Rhody is the editor-in-chief of Web Services Journal. He is a respected industry expert and a consultant with a leading consulting services company. Sean@sys-con.com