Some Things Never Change

As CIOs start to put .Net and WebSphere (its arch competitor from IBM) to work for Web services, the old question of which technology architecture do you subscribe to may be gone, but there's a new question: Which tools are appropriate where?

Despite the fact that IBM and Microsoft have played nice on standards, they're still sniping when it comes to marketing their particular tools to CIOs. But what's interesting about this competition for CIOs' attention is that, for the most part, CIOs aren't paying much attention. CIOs aren't betting on either .Net or WebSphere. They're betting on Web services. .Net and WebSphere happen to be means to that end. As Lifka says, "What you really care about is that .Net supports Web services and managed code. That's what makes it attractive."

Many CIOs use both .Net and WebSphere and will continue to. There is no consensus on which tool is better. Many are choosing to operate with Microsoft on the client side and IBM technology in the back office; old habits are hard to break. But standards have made allegiance to any one vendor out of date, says Bob Laird, chief IT architect at MCI. "Look, if one person's cement deteriorates, or can't hold up, we can always put the other person's cement in."

The Importance of Standards

With Web services, CIOs have a common language for easier integration, the capability to expose their companies and others to a whole new range of services, and less risk in choosing technology at the outset of projects. Vendors have to compete on merit, not by virtue of lock-in. It sounds like the dawn of a golden age for CIOs.

But there are risks. If vendors don't adhere to standards, CIOs could end up where they started, having to do tricky and expensive integrations of proprietary technologies - and dealing with angry businesspeople wondering what happened. "Keeping to standards overshadows everything else," says Northrop Grumman vice president and CIO Tom Shelman. "Like many CIOs, I've placed some pretty big bets [on Web services]; we've sold this architecture and the promise of easier integration and lower costs to other executives. So the applications vendors have to play fair and keep it open. When they start getting outside the standards, they start putting CIOs like me at risk." As commodity development allows Web services to take off, standards must be honed and further developed, and companies building Web services need to discipline themselves to adhere to the standards while pressuring vendors to do the same.

To date, the MAD (mutually assured destruction) theory has held standards together. As West at H&R Block says, "We're not going to use anything that's hard to run in other environments." In other words, if a vendor doesn't hew to standards, West will walk away.

Meet the New CIO

No longer technology tsars, CIOs need to be business experts who understand services. When decisions are dictated by the technology architecture, it's limiting but it's also a crutch. The limitations of the technology could explain a lot away. In a Web services world, the CIO carries the weight.

A new job in a new landscape means different challenges, not fewer. Shadman Zafar, Verizon's VP of architecture and e-services, argues that the CIO's new central mission is simple: Operationalize Web services.

By that, he means create an SLA-like model for the Web services that programmers develop. It has to be clear to anyone who might want to develop or use a Web service how it can scale, what its level of security is and so forth. And if others want to use that service, the group that developed it needs to be compensated for its work. If anything, Zafar says, a vendor such as Microsoft with .Net should focus on helping CIOs manage the tools and services rather than focus on the tools themselves.

Zafar has operationalized his development with "IT Workbench", a formal and standard procedure for application development. "As soon as you start a project, you go and search for parts, for code already developed [which is stored in a taxonomic, searchable repository] that can help, and you'll know what that code is capable of. You get what you can use and develop the rest" - in .Net, WebSphere, whatever is most appropriate - "and then all of it is thrown back on the shelf for others to use."

This takes time and money to get up and running. Web services is no free ride. Ian Goldsmith of SOA Software, which works with Verizon, compares the current environment to the challenges faced by auto manufacturers in the 1990s when they began revamping their assembly lines to build several models of cars on a single platform, using shared components. At the time, the changeover required a huge investment in time, money and training in order to realize the savings that were deferred by the initial investment, says Goldsmith. But today those savings are beginning to be realized.

"The complexity of the governance problem that you have to deal with in a services-oriented environment is big," says Keith Glennan, Northrop Grumman's CTO. "The CIO has to sink time and money into planning and operation," says Zafar. Otherwise, he says, Web services is just a bunch of "toys" and "tricks" - little pieces of code that do neat things but that can't help the business in any meaningful way. Without operationalization, Zafar says, "Web services is just a little bit of magic - and magic runs out."