Jiri’s Notepad

You may consider Nicholas Carr biased, and many of his arguments unsubstantiated and repetitive, yet the folllowing extract from his take on web services rings true with me.

“McAfee explains that computer-mediated collaboration between companies requires three very different kinds of agreements. The first and simplest are agreements on “transport”-the networking protocols that allow applications to connect. The second are agreements on “payload”-the data standards that allow applications to share information. The third and most complicated are agreements on “process”-the sequence of activities in a work flow and the allocation of responsibility for them. The problem, McAfee points out, is that web services only really automate transport agreements: ‘They make it possible for two applications to talk to each other[i.e., transport], but they don’t specify what conversations they should have [process] or what words they should use [payload].’

It’s possible for two or more companies to negotiate agreements about payload and process but, as always, that takes a lot of human interaction and a lot of time. McAfee describes how it took more than a year for IBM and one of its distributors to hash out the shared protocols necessary to create an automatic, computer-to-computer ordering system. Such efforts will be worthwhile for automating stable, high-value connections between the processes of large companies-the kinds of processes that used to be linked through electronic data interchange, for instance-but otherwise they’ll rarely be worth the hassle.”