RISK NO. 2: The lack of standards breeds complexity.
MITIGATION: Support multiple standards for now.
The users of my information and my services and my architectures are frequently disconnected, often have extremely small bandwidth, and have to do business in real time with organisations that are dispersed globally," says the Navy's Shephard. A big benefit of Web services is that those disparate groups - whether a land-based command centre or a battleship - can easily access centrally managed data. But there's no consistent way to deliver that information through the many proprietary portal platforms Navy users have deployed.
A standard called Web services for remote portals would provide a common way to plug Web services into any portal, but it's still under development by Oasis. As part of the Navy's coping strategy, it's using its market power (the Navy spends $US1 billion a year on its intranet alone) and influence with standards organisations to cajole vendors into supporting as many of the emerging standards as possible. The Navy calls its strategy "vendor neutrality" because it presumes infrastructure vendors will eventually provide products that will work with any standard and therefore will be easy to integrate.
"It's a difficult strategy for the short term, and the most powerful strategy for the long term," says Shephard. In the short term, Shephard's staff has to put extra effort into making Web services work in a non-standard environment and keep up with technical details. The alternative - picking a few software products that every Navy unit would use - would ultimately be a more difficult strategy to execute, says Shephard, because it would risk getting stuck with proprietary software. "Then we would be tied to a single view change and a single company's ability to generate new and inventive ideas," she adds. In the meantime, the Navy is using its portal connector to facilitate integration between Web services and proprietary applications.
For Motorola's Redshaw, that strategy of covering your bases with multiple standards extends to the choice between Microsoft's .Net and Sun Microsystems' J2EE as development platforms for Web services applications. In his view, there isn't really a choice: Most companies, he thinks, will have to invest in both, as Motorola has. "It's strategically dangerous to go down one path or another," says Redshaw. Most established companies already use J2EE, he notes, but "if you say, I don't like Microsoft, and get stuck in stupid politics, you may get leapfrogged".
While it's hard to know exactly how much it's going to cost companies that maintain both platforms, Tom Welsh, senior consultant with Cutter, says to plan for purchasing software and servers to support both environments, as well as staffing up with trained programmers. "Few people are dynamic enough to be conversant in both .Net and J2EE," notes Welsh. It's also necessary to account for the cost of managing and maintaining the two platforms. Yes, those costs add up, but as Welsh says: "It's a mistake to hope for the benefits of IT when you grudge the time, money and sheer effort necessary to understand what it's all about."
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