BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Class project: making sense of 'Web services'
By D. C. Denison, Globe Columnist, 7/7/2002
The assignment was cruel and unusual, even by business school standards: figure out what's really
going on in that much-hyped, supposedly emerging technology called ''Web services.''
The students in the Boston University School of Management's MS.MBA program had just one
week this summer to make sense of a category that even trend-conscious technology geeks have
trouble explaining.
When I spoke with professor George Wyner, he said he thought the weeklong exercise would be
''a challenge'' for the students, who are ambitiously attempting to earn two master's degrees -
business administration and information management - by supplementing the traditional two-year
MBA curriculum with extras including ''intensive'' summer sessions.
But Web services? Is that fair?
Even Wyner conceded he was having trouble getting his arms around the topic.
''We can't really give students a clear answer about Web services,'' he said. ''We're all trying to
understand how this is going to play out.''
He insisted, however, that the project was more business than tech.
''Since a key component of business is information,'' he said, ''the students need to know how to
build things out of information.''
So what are Web services? You may be familiar with the best-known branded version, Microsoft's
.Net, which Bill Gates & Co. are betting will be their next big profitable platform. In Microsofts's
view, Web services will ''allow applications to communicate and share data over the Internet or an
intranet, regardless of operating system or programming language.''
Microsoft competitor Sun Microsystems, also in the Web services game, is promoting its
Java-based Sun ONE Developer Platform with pretty much the same kind of verbiage: applications
running over networks, multiplatform, multidevice ...
But what does Web services really mean? I was hoping the students could help me out after their
stressful week of Web services immersion.
''At first we had no idea what Web services were,'' said student Arthur Kah-Git Wong. ''After the
first day, we were all sitting around a pub complaining that we had no idea what this technology
was about.''
By the middle of the week, however, Wong began to ''see the money.''
''The way Web services makes everything connected, and available, I can see where if a company
develops a product, and they are good at it, they can sell the capabilities to others,'' he said. ''And if
they aren't good at creating these software products, they can just buy them from other
companies.''
By Friday, Wong reports, he was a believer.
''Web services are going to happen and businesses will be built around them,'' he said.
Asked what he thought would be the first applications, Wong replied, ''The first services will be
something along the lines of payment things. There will be Web services to authenticate credit card
information, for example, or process micropayments.''
Annie Wu, a classmate of Wong's, explained Web services this way: ''It's a system where
everybody is kind of equal,'' she said. ''I think it's going to change business because there won't be
as much custom work.
''It's a standard format for information exchange, so you can build things using it,'' she continued.
''Working with Web services is like setting up switches rather than building whole systems from
scratch.''
When asked for examples, Yu mentioned a friend who is working for a Chinese language Web
auction company now part-owned by eBay.
''Whenever they create something, they are using Sun's Web services Java software, which gets
them going faster and reduces their costs.''
Some of the class projects cooked up by Wyner also pushed the students into hand-to-hand
combat with Web services. One project involved using an interface to an online miniprogram that
generated song lyrics written by Neil Finn (of Crowded House fame) and hooking it up to another
miniprogram that translated the lyrics into Spanish. Later in the week, the students stitched together
clusters of miniprograms that would deliver information and results from the Head of the Charles
rowing regatta to multiple devices and platforms.
''What we learned is that Web services allow you to integrate services and computer platforms and
programs that you haven't been able to do before,'' said student Jonathan Yee after the week was
over.
''People are starting to realize now that it's real hard to make it on your own technology,'' he added.
''You're not going to win on technology, so you might as well use Web services.''
Yee mentioned banking products as naturals for Web services, since they have to interact with a
wide variety of legacy systems.
Talking to the students, I felt as if I was getting multiple camera angles on an object that was still
hazy and ill-defined. That made sense to Wyner, who explained that anyone who really wanted to
understand Web services would have to take the same approach he and his students adopted.
''When this tidal wave of buzzwords is washing over you, the real question is, `How do I actually
do something with it?''' he said. ''To find that out you have to do what we did: take a deep breath
and just leap into it.''
D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.
This story ran on page E2 of the Boston Globe on 7/7/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. |
