SOA – Hooray, got web services, now what?

Just been talking to a friend of mine who was pleased to announce his company has just implemented a new version of their ERP environment. He was quite chuffed with it because now he had lots of new functionality inside his system. Turning this functionality into something that his business could use left him with somewhat disappointing consultancy costs, but never mind, he was happy.

“But”, he said, “this environment comes with Web Services. What do I do with them?”

Fair question. So I asked if it came with the ability to orchestrate these new web services. Looking at me somewhat puzzled, he asked: “ability to orchestrate ? Not sure what you mean.”

“A web service in itself is a nice thing to have but it doesn’t do anything. What you need is a way to use web services from different systems in order to make your way of doing business more agile.” – I replied. And I continued with an example.

Suppose your new environment can expose the outstanding balances of invoices. What you could do is define Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that keep track of the fact that the outstanding balances together with their due dates are enough to keep the cash flow position of the company stable. In order to do this, you need something that can calculate these KPI’s and use the outstanding balances from the web service to come to measurements.

If you have the ability to present these KPI’s as a service (possibly a web service) then it would be quite simple to present these figures though any web environment or even to a PDA.

Think about it, wouldn’t it be great to be sitting on the beach of Allicante and being able to check your company’s cash position without leaving your cocktail?

And all this doesn’t have to cost the earth. There are a few solutions available that actually make use of your existing web services and can turn other systems into a SOA-compliant system including web services.

One of my personal favorites is the Google Homepage. I customized it by simply adding a few links and now it shows the local weather, my calendar, my activities, some KPI’s for my company and the latest technology news. (And some other gimmicks that are not very relevant here)

An upgraded system containing web services is like a HD ready TV. It has got the HD socket but without the HD Box (orchestrator) it is still the same as a normal TV.