Creating a Connected Business with Web Services

This note is excerpted from a longer paper Building the Connected Enterprise.

The Internet promised to streamline business-to-business transactions and communication as never before. But because of the complexity, the lack of standards and the large numbers of disparate business software applications crisscrossing the Web - that promise has been a long time coming.

Web services (a poorly conceived name for the technology) are different from Web sites that help to connect people with technology and information. Web services are a set of technologies designed to automate connections across applications and databases. They are built upon a set of standards and protocols that all major technology vendors have embraced.

The benefit of this is that they replace "big bang" approaches to technology with targeted incrementalism. The business proposition in this scenario is much more compelling: Invest modest sums of money with relatively short lead-times (often six to twelve months) and generate tangible business benefits, particularly in the form of operating savings. In these challenging economic times, that's a powerful proposition.