Like all new technologies Web Services usage will morph as we understand more of the potential. This week we look at how Web Services can extend the desktop for business process integration and knowledge working.
We expect Web Services to become ubiquitous and the de facto approach to delivering information and functionality. But who is the consumer of these Services, and how will they use them to solve their business problems? Today, the majority of Web Services usage centers on traditional heavyweight business and IT problems such as Supply Chain Automation, Enterprise Application Integration and B2B. No surprise given that one might expect these to deliver the biggest payback. There’s no shortage of tools for the professional developer to build client applications that request remote Web Services in these contexts, but what about end-users? Are Web Services the preserve of professional developers, or will the knowledge worker be able to construct their own solutions without being an expert in SOAP, Java and C#?
ENABLING THE KNOWLEDGE WORKER
The browser together with the portal concept have revolutionized the practices and productivity of knowledge workers, providing them access to the vast world of information on the web both within and outside their organization. However, their reuse of that information in terms of including it in other applications or productivity tools is usually done by unsophisticated techniques such as a manual cut and paste. Web Services promise to radically improve that process by enabling the applications to retrieve that information directly through a standard interface.
Key to enabling the knowledge worker is not to present them with a pre-canned application but to provide them with easy access to information sources from which they can to some extent construct their own solutions – be they temporary, exploratory, or of very narrow application – without recourse to the IT department. Often they are not constructing their own applications, but want to integrate the information sources into their familiar desktop tools such as Microsoft Office. So what options are available?
HOW EASY TO USE?
Given their leadership role in Web Services and their dominance of the desktop market Microsoft themselves would seem an obvious source of such solutions. And sure enough there is a Web Services toolkit that can be downloaded for Office XP and 2003. However, whilst a wizard guides you through the basic process this is a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) solution, which although very powerful is more suited to use by developers than knowledge workers. Infopath is another Microsoft solution that enables users to for example build their own forms on top of Web Services.
I tried using these solutions together with some publicly available Web Services and hit an immediate road block. Whilst the tools are straightforward, the Web Services that I chose to consume were not so easy to use. WSDL defines the interface, but it doesn’t really tell you how to use it from a business process point of view. Ultimately, other emerging specs such as BPEL will help, but even then, the consumer is dependent on the Service being well designed and fit for general purpose use. Even once I had figured out what the Web Service did, I still ended up coding non-trivial amounts of VBA to use them.
We highlighted this problem recently in a report on Service Based Package applications that focused on salesforce.com where we were less than impressed with the lack of what we would consider a genuine SOA. Rather it was just low-level interfaces wrapped as Web Services intended for tool builders who might want to reuse salesforce.com’s services in their own products, rather than the knowledge worker or business user. One of salesforce.com’s responses to this is the release last month of their Office Edition which uses Web Services behind the scenes to add a new salesforce.com menu to Word, Excel, and Outlook enabling users to use Office as a front end to salesforce.com for both input and presentation of data.
A NEW TOOLS SPACE?
An interesting new take on this problem comes from RatchetSoft who we report on in this month’s journal. RachetSoft is focused on the area of enabling extremely rapid application customization by end users without IT developer intervention, an area they refer to as Service Oriented Mass Customization (SOMC) . The Rachet-X tool allows knowledge workers to easily assemble data from existing applications and Web Services into new solutions, for example by mapping data from a field in an existing UI into a Web Service request.
The basic idea underlying SOMC is that if an application can enable introspection, new data can be made available and behaviors introduced using power tools that allow users, with relatively low technical skills, to create the extensions themselves.
The RatchetSoft approach enables a developer to implement introspective capability transforming user interface elements into meta data that enables instance data to be accessed and manipulated (read and written) at runtime using Web Services. At runtime the user has access to the instance data, in a similar way to say a Windows clipboard. RatchetSoft provide a process mapping and orchestration engine that allows users to identify and connect Web Services to an application without the developer modifying any application code.
SUMMARY
Presenting knowledge workers with easy to use information that happens to arrive via Web Services, is not the same as presenting them with easy to use Web Services. Enabling the knowledge worker needs easy to use Web Services toolkits AND easy to understand and use Web Services.
Service Providers will need to work harder on delivering SOA that not only abstracts the Service away from the implementation but makes them as business meaningful as possible, so they can be consumed by the knowledge worker as well as the professional developer. This might mean delivering different sets of Web Services that expose the same information source but in alternative ways depending on the intended audience, for example reflecting their skill sets, or the degree of flexibility they need.
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