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Future Enterprise- Web Services |
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Globalisation, increasing automation and growth of e-business, are all driving the growth of the service economy. In turn the service economy is driving the growth of web-based services across the internet.
Major productivity increases are now being seen in most industries due to the automation and streamlining of traditional processes. The continuing challenge is the abstraction and encapsulation of knowledge from the physical processes, enabled by advances in the ICT and modeling sciences, creating intellectual property assets that can generate ongoing value for the enterprise.
A web service is an application that can be accessed and implemented online and is largely independent of a particular computing platform or software model. Routine service functions are converted into codified computable processes with clearly defined rules for execution, using the new Service Oriented Architecture-SOA.
Industry is beginning to embrace web services and service value networks because of their productivity and flexibility capabilities. A vast array of business services are now provided over the internet and account for 80% of enterprise economic activity.
Traditionally, applications have been delivered piecemeal. This has resulted in a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company as a whole, increasing IT costs, but not delivering optimal gains for the business. The desire to reduce costs by re-using the knowledge assets of an enterprise, while increasing flexibility by reducing the time to implement a new service, has led enterprises to adopt a SOA.
This allows re-use of assets in applications and enables quicker and easier system integration. In the longer term SOA / Web Service standards will allow virtualisation and decoupling of software and business process components within a service-oriented framework, making software updates transparent and automatic.
Overall such a framework can increase flexibility and the speed of deployment, while also reducing the cost of implementation through consolidation and reuse.
Web services are also ideal for allowing developers to adapt core Enterprise Resource Planning-ERP systems to fast-changing business processes. They can be orchestrated to create multi-service business processes that connect via a SOA to a robust, reliable back-end, adding easy-to-use functionality. ERP will also need multithreading capability for massive realtime execution such as realtime billing applications, as well as connecting to sensor networks and performing complex event processing such as mobile computing services.
Future Trends
The objective of the Web Services paradigm is to allow the enterprise to be more responsive to an ever-changing social and economic environment and to do so at a lower cost than traditional approaches. New IT architectures and development strategies beyond SOAs will therefore evolve in the future.
The trend towards the web service–enabled economy will continue with increasing abstraction and dependence on the automatic delivery and maintenance of services driven by innovative algorithmic and artificial intelligence methods, combined with web-based delivery and distribution.
Advances in computing have already allowed companies to improve profits and financial
mnagement by providing high quality, personalised services more easily and cheaply. As technology provides consumers with access to vastly more information and choices, the quality of service delivery will become increasingly important, with customer satisfaction paramount. Service orientation will therefore dramatically impact business organisations, including accelerating the redesign of system and software architectures towards a more networked orientation. The role of innovation in this process will become increasingly vital.
To compete in the future, all organisations must transform their operations towards a web service-oriented structure.
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