Common Sense IT

How the Solution Cycle Empowers Companies

The factor most under appreciated in achieving an online initiative that delivers on its promise is what we refer to as Solution Cycle Management.  In other words, there will always be a problem to be solved. 

The complexity of life in today’s world is proof enough of that.  The technology you choose to use should allow you to create new online capabilities quickly, adding efficiencies as your business sets its focus on capturing the marketplace of tomorrow.  Simply knowing that your internet infrastructure can handle whatever’s coming, gives you the freedom to run your business the way that works for you, confident that your online initiatives will blend with your business environment in a way that keeps you proactively implementing and refining your strategies.

Wouldn’t you rather have a proactive forward motion than to be captive to stress and tactical, defensive reactions. Common sense says, 'Of course!'  Businesses that are shortsighted and choose to solve only one problem at a time and then start over each time a new problem surfaces will never win.  Common sense -- everyday, we multi-task --we have to think holistically about many facets of our living -- and that is also the case when implementing and utilizing technology.

We’re all familiar with the cultural climate of an organization where problems aren’t solved. People become discouraged and cynical; they don’t think anything they could do would help. They fall into routine patterns that keep inefficiencies in place. Too often, disappointing results from new technology implementations leave teams feeling that the changes they really want to see will never happen.

You can keep working on the same problem over and over again, and some companies unknowingly choose to do this --  so they won’t have to face the uncertainty of new problems. When they have a problem, they hold off on a solution and stay with the problem they know. After all, once they solve that problem, they will soon face another problem which could be awful (for example, how to justify spending $250,000 on an essentially static site that doesn’t allow you to easily evolve it in ways you need).   Or some organizations have gotten burned by decisions made in the past that didn’t deliver the results promised or far exceeded the estimated costs – just once is enough in most corporate environments – after that it’s time to CYA.  So the problems persist.

Anticipators grab for the next problem because they believe they can handle it.  They choose what kinds of problems to have. They also surround themselves with trusted vendors and partners who support the solving of their problems so they’re not alone when a new problem arises. They use these problems to create new capabilities that they might never have seen before the problem was defined. These new capabilities can then excite employees, customers, or partners. When new solutions do deliver, a culture of enthusiasm is created.

Blending technology and business processes is part of proactive solution cycle management. This doesn’t simply mean that your marketing personnel just agree to use the new technology, rather it points to a synthesis between your various kinds of users – employees, customers, prospects, etc. – and the new capacities your technology offers them.

Now more than ever, marketing organizations must blend their tried and true marketing practices with innovative technology. This includes combining online and offline initiatives. For example, having people sign up for a local seminar through your website, which makes them the recipient of a targeted email campaign, which also allows you to manage a comprehensive Do-Not-Email list.  While they’re at your site, they can get access to relevant information about the seminar, or even take an initial questionnaire or survey prior to attending.  After the seminar, send thank you emails to those who attended, and invite them to provide feedback about their experience at the seminar. While the software systems you put in place are critical, technology alone will not solve the problem.

Competitive advantage goes to those companies who know how to integrate marketing throughout their sales system.  Arming your sales force or partners with the information they need to close sales is critical – imagine if marketing could create online ‘battle cards’ or comparisons with the messaging and arguments needed to counter objections and position your company to win the sale!  Make it possible for the people selling your products and services to be top-notch spokespeople for your organization.

We have worked with many organizations to implement tools that grow and evolve as they grow and evolve – without breaking the bank – so it is possible to harness the power of technology –  and not break the bank.  Any technology solution also requires the focus, drive, and determination to utilize the technology and make it work effectively within your organization.

The Solution Cycle – A Breakthrough Concept For Managing your Online Initiatives

Understanding the solution cycle and preparing to manage it proactively is critical to implementing successful online initiatives.  Let’s explore what this concept I’m labeling the “solution cycle” is and you’ll see the common sense to this approach, in how it can work to drive innovation, as well as provide competitive advantage.

As soon as a company implements an online initiative, usually an external website to start, they enter the solution cycle. Each solution is the beginning of the next problem. The website that creates an online presence for your company and expands your audience for your marketing messaging now needs to be integrated to a back-end system. Or perhaps your sales force is complaining because they see the new site but the tools they need aren’t available to them because the site has no permissions structure to allow them access to confidential information. These kinds of problems can either cause your business innovation to grind to a halt, or they can feed the ongoing development of your vision.

Companies manage this solution cycle in one of three ways:

1. Avoid – ignore the growing problems until you can’t anymore, then drop other projects and react, defensively and tactically.
2. Spend –throw money at the latest problem, contributing to the large service revenues that many Internet technology providers reap
3. Anticipate – you know this solution will create problems you can’t now anticipate so you prepare by using flexible solutions that will expand; you proactively seek the next problem, taking the offensive and strategically mining these problems for new solutions, thus driving innovation. You integrate the motion of the solution cycle into your business, using it to pull you forward.

Avoiding the problem in the hopes that it will resolve itself is one of the main choices made by businesses today.  But avoidance has a way of increasing the potential damages that choosing to do nothing can cause.

Throwing money at those pesky problems is another favorite tactic.  Once you’ve figured out that the problem can’t be avoided, then the next step companies overwhelmingly choose is to throw money at it – as if a problem can be bought off.  Don’t fool yourself that money spent to solve only one issue actually solves the problem.  What people forget, is that issues are multi-faceted and will usually rear their ugly heads again, once they’ve worked their way around the quick fix you’ve purchased.  What if the cost involved in expansion could be relegated to an expense item rather than a capital outlay that required retooling your budget?  What if you could address a problem quickly, efficiently and organically within the structure of your current system and move on easily to be ready for the next one.  Because one thing is certain – there is always a next one.

The more quickly and proactively you manage your solution cycle, the higher your competitive advantage. When you’re set up to manage the occurrence of problems and solutions, the next problem occurs as an opportunity and doesn’t slow business. As we’ll see in my next posts, new problems can actually excite your company and pull it forward.

The problem of Vision

I’ve been exploring the Promise of Technology as it relates to marketing and sales.  My last post talked about how the IT status quo hurts online business initiatives.  In this post, I explore the notion of vision, and how knowing everything before you start is a recipe for missed opportunities and inflexible implementations.  I’m not saying don’t have your ducks in a row and know what you want to do – but the need to know all of what you want to be able to do is more an outdated method of requirements definition, than a tool that enables the flexible systems necessary for today.

One of the most significant barriers to mid-sized business’ implementations is not the lack of vision, but either the presence of a partial vision or a complete vision that seems impossible to implement. It’s common practice to spend months detailing a Portal, Internet, Intranet or Web Content Management (WCM) project, spelling out the requirements, the vision, and the ways it might need to extend or integrate. A monolithic vision with its resulting detailed projects takes time to articulate fully and then even more time to implement. During that time frame, the business realities may change in ways that the planners did not anticipate. It’s a classic systems problem that users’ needs change, or were not accurately articulated, altering the scope of the project – commonly called “scope creep.” The traditional solution has been to try various ways of defining the whole problem, creating a big enough picture to encompass all possible aspects of the problem. Legacy players in the market often say that you need a complete requirements definition that specifies what your vision is. That first step can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Often executives don’t engage in the online initiatives that could bring them success because they don’t have the whole vision for it, they don’t want to spend the money to create that plan, or they can’t absorb the cost if it fails.  Given recent economic pressures, marketing executives must justify all expenditures more than ever before, creating a CYA environment. It’s easy for them to get stuck trying to define their specific requirements and never step up to the plate at all. No one wants to be the executive who set in motion a project that fails to deliver the promised results.

A related practice that often contributes to these failures is to define the full scope of the project, as above, and then compile the “best of breed” parts that comprise that solution. This usually results in companies spending thousands in integration and consulting to find the right parts and fit them together. After racking up many failed projects that attempted this “Best of Breed” approach, companies are now interested in finding total solutions that are already integrated, that can be implemented incrementally.

If you look at the business realities of today, visions change, plans are altered, and you need software that changes too. A static, monolithic vision can be out of date by the time it’s implemented. The marketplace is moving faster than ever and mid-sized companies are challenged to keep up.   In fact, mid-sized companies have the capacity to move more quickly than their larger competitors, except that they often fail to implement the kind of technology that will capitalize on their internal, cultural speed. What is needed are software systems and business processes that equip your organization to win.

You may have been told that you “have to layout the whole picture – complete with where you want your online expression to be in five years,” but that’s ridiculous.  In today’s changing business climate, it’s only to be expected that visions change.  The environment of your marketplace, the economy, the changing positions of your competitors all necessitate that you have a vision that is fluid and organic. Even if the words of your mission statement don’t change, the ways in which your company implements these words must reach a level of dynamic change that companies never had to deal with in the past. 

Here’s the good news:  If you thought that you needed to have the whole vision and that has your eyes glazing over, you can relax.  In today’s market, if your Internet software can’t roll with the punches, you don’t have the right tools. So here’s what you need to know; think incrementally. An inherent trait of a valuable online initiative is its ability to be flexible, and scale to adopt new capabilities as needed. And to enable that without backtracking or expensive re-engineering work.

Choosing the components of your online initiative by true, quantifiable value and then selecting the ones most important to the way you do business is a good way to begin.  This doesn’t mean taking a “best of breed” approach and selecting a solution that may not integrate down the road; you want to begin inside of an infrastructure, but with only the pieces you need today. Once you have narrowed the array of opportunities to a critical focus, find out how the process is accomplished now.  Determine what elements can be refined online that will eliminate time, confusion, repetition and other barriers to productivity that consume resources better utilized elsewhere.

Begin with the single online initiative or project that you need today, and choose an infrastructure that is built to expand, that allows you to adapt to the marketplace of tomorrow.

I'll start exploring a concept I call the "solution cycle" in my next post -- a common sense way to look at and approach IT Implemenations, your Online initiatives, and other highly changing or dynamic processes.

How the IT ‘Status Quo’ Hurts Online Business Implementations

As posted in Marketing Interactions: “How Agile is your technology?” – good question!  How have the “status quo” practices implemented by your IT group or systems vendor stifled your ability to get what you need?  Keep reading, it’s common sense – and there are common sense solutions to these issues that are working.

Marketing departments have been moving more and more of their customer, partner and staff interaction to the Internet. Some are forced to make this move, while many have proactively found the Internet a valuable medium for attracting prospects, retaining customers, providing key information to sales staff and partners, and streamlining business processes. In fact, a recent report by Thomas Register found that companies list the Internet as the third most powerful way of gaining a return on their marketing investment, above trade shows and advertising. Internet-based initiatives represent a huge opportunity for marketers to get more mileage from sales and marketing budgets, if they’re implemented well. Otherwise they can create more problems than they solve.

Over the past 10 years, companies have invested millions of dollars in state of the art systems such as a Website Infrastructure, and the necessary back-end systems like Customer Relationship Management, Workflow, and Sales Force Automation – but despite the projections used to justify the projects, for the majority of those implementations, the reality has fallen short of delivering bottom line results. 

While large organizations can afford to try and fail many times before they get it right, if you’re a small to mid-size business, you can’t afford to take that sort of gamble.  You’ve got to create not only a successful online (and offline) presence, you’ve got to create a ‘capacity’ that allows you to be flexible and nimble with your online initiatives.

Mid-sized companies now have access to the same capabilities of the biggest online players, without the hefty price tag.  The Internet can create a personalized feel for these users, drawing them into closer relationship with the company.  The promise of technology means that this outcome shouldn’t be reserved for the most affluent companies.  Beyond that, the possibilities of the Internet offer a unique opportunity to level the playing field, providing huge advantages to those willing to integrate the web with their overall business processes.

So why is it that businesses don’t seem to get what they need from their IT implementations?  If you’re like most marketing executives, you’ve already implemented a website and probably one other online initiative, like an intranet or extranet.  If so, then you’ve probably also experienced the problems this new technology can create for your business.  In my experience, there are four key areas of common failure in Internet-based implementations, which we call the “status quo”:

• Users are Upset  (aka “This Website Sucks!”)  -- Website user expectations are high.  According to Genex and Jupiter research, 65 percent of people surveyed said they would not patronize a poorly designed website, even for their favorite brand.  Websites can harm relationships through outdated content, inaccuracies, hard to navigate directions, and widgets that don’t deliver useful outcomes.  This results in customer, your sales force, or partners feeling ignored and underserved.  You have not equipped them to win.   Just think about your own frustration when an organization you frequent, or do business with, hasn’t coordinated their offline and online initiatives, or has outdated information on their website.   Investing in homegrown systems, or static HTML-based websites, where one-size fits all, is no longer adequate to compete in today’s marketing and sales world.
• Lost Sales (aka  ‘How many sales did I lose because I didn’t have the correct information?’) – Often, companies discover, much to late in their implementations, that they don’t have the flexibility they need to respond to either a) their competitors, or b) the ever-changing marketing and sales climates in which they operate.  On top of that, they don’t even have control over their own tools.  Many marketing organizations leave the web design ( and delivery) work for their advertising agencies or outside design groups, who charge a lot for the ‘strategy’ and ‘design’ but don’t deliver the technology to make it easy to manage after the launch.  This leaves marketing departments dependent on those agencies for simple day-to-day changes, that cost a lot and also take time to get live on the site.  Meanwhile, IT departments have a full plate of responsibility and a growing backlog of demands on their time, often leaving Marketing departments waiting for weeks or months to update  information or move new campaigns onto the Internet.  These delays and lags create information gaps within organizations.  A sales person may be emailed information about a new campaign but unable to show prospects that same information on the company’s website.  Or a customer may see current information in one area of the site, but be unable to take action on it.
• Wasted Resources (aka “Why does it take an IT staff member with a computer science degree to insert a comma or correct a typo?”) -- Not only can poorly implemented Internet technologies sap money and time from your organization, they are a roadblock to providing the much-needed integration of online initiatives with back-end business processes (and systems).  They result in a drain that will continue to use your highly-trained personnel for routine tasks, keep others from having up-to-date information, stall new initiative delivery, and make it tough for your company to actually win at the sales/marketing games you’re playing. Redundant or hard-to-use processes push users to avoid them altogether or to spend most of their time struggling with the tools that are supposed to make them more productive.
• Spiraling Costs (aka “We’re paying how much more than we agreed at the start?”) -- You want to know that you’ve selected a vendor that won’t hit you with hidden or surprise costs, or that plans to make most of their money off service costs that aren’t stated up front. You need clearly defined costs, no surprises, and the expertise of companies that have implemented this sort of infrastructure and toolset effectively.  According to Meta Group, when companies implement portal solutions, only 10% to 20% of the total project cost comes from software licensing. In the stats on Web Content Management, the services margin is even more clear. Frost & Sullivan found leading software vendors who now sell their content management solutions at a heavy discount, taking a loss on the software itself in order to gain lucrative service contracts. 

It’s possible for these problems and others that arise to actually benefit your business, but for this to happen you have to step outside the status quo in Internet-based implementations. It’s not unusual for a company to have run into one or more of these problems and stopped cold, unwilling to open further the Pandora’s Box of online complications. One experience of too much effort for little benefit is enough to make many mid-sized companies gun-shy.

How has the status quo hurt your online implementations?  We’ll look a little further at the impact the status quo has on delivering flexible systems by looking at the common approach to “systems strategy” and “business requirements analysis” that keeps IT unable to deliver what business really needs.

The Promise of Technology for Marketing

In 2002, Information Week quoted Stephen Diorio as saying, “For years, technology has held out an elusive promise:  turning sales and marketing systems into high-performance engines of revenue growth.  Most of us are still waiting for results.”

Here we are, nearing the end of 2005, and most organizations are still waiting.  Many executives have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Internet-based initiatives without finding an increase in the return on investment of their marketing dollars.  Still others never capitalize on the benefits technology could create for their organizations for fear of repeating the horror stories about projects that come in late, over budget, and often times don’t deliver the needed or expected capabilities.  They’re right to be concerned because the status quo of today’s Internet technology implementations has not been beneficial to the needs of today’s business reality.

The promise of technology for marketing departments is to increase the ratio of dollars invested in sales and marketing to revenue realized.  That statement is just common sense given today's business realities.  Read the following post from the Marketing Interactions blog, "ROW - Return on Website."  Further, today’s technology is expected to give companies a competitive advantage, plus increased productivity, growth, and customer satisfaction.  However, marketing organizations are finding that in order to receive the full benefits of Internet technology they need the ability to create evolving solutions, adapt to an ever-changing marketplace, and blend new technologies with their existing business processes.

I’m going to spend the next few posts exploring the following questions:

1. How does the “status quo” hurt online business implementations?
2. How will managing your company’s “solution cycle” allow you to plan for problems that aren’t on your radar yet?
3. What are five business measures that drive success in online initiatives?
4. What can you really expect when implementing an effective online initiative and what failures should you watch out for and avoid before they happen to you?

What’s been your experience in launching online initiatives?  Does your website, intranet, and extranet deliver the necessary functionality that provides the kind of business gain you had hoped for?

They can, and business users should demand it.  Implementing an effective, evolving infrastructure doesn't have to break the bank either.  It’s time for businesses to start realizing the promise of technology – we’re going to explore and demonstrate how!

Managing Email Marketing: It's All About Deliverabililty

I have learned a lot recently about managing the sending of emails -- from your website or customer portal/community, or from your marketing DB.  There are a bunch of issues for effectively managing the use of Email technology and ESP's (Email Service Providers) that are great to know about, and to think through.  This post sorts them out so your common sense can go to work -- it's possible to set yourselves and your organization up to win and to improve your effectiveness at email communications.

Before you read further, it might be valuable to check out this article from Direct Magazine, entitled "Five Questions to Ask E-Mail Service Providers".  The article offers five steps to making sure your ESP can help you get your e-mail message safely past the filters -- so you can understand and measure whether your messages are getting delivered, or ending up in your recipient's spam or junk mail folder.  Here's a quick rundown:

1. Insist on independent inbox and spam folder tracking -- where there are a number of email boxes at all of your key ISP's in your mailling list, so you can get some real data about the actual delivery of emails to their destinations.
2. Check to see what other mailers the ESP you’re considering services, and think about spending more for a dedicated IP address for your mail.  If you share an IP -- who knows what's being sent, and that IP may end up on a blacklist, and not by your doing -- but you will suffer lost opportunity from mail that doesn't get delivered.
3. Check into an ESP’s bounce management policies and capabilities.  Get familiar with "hard" vs "soft" bounces and what they can mean -- how does your ESP interpret this information?
4.    Find out what spam filters the ESP uses for checking deliverability and how they check your HTML code for correctness.  You've got to check with things other than shareware like Spam Assassin.
5. Look for an ESP with a full set of delivery features -- like blacklist monitoring, whitelisting, abuse board monitoring, etc.

If your head isn't swimming already -- then consider all of your emails being sent -- are different departments using different ESP's?  Are they integrated with your marketing DB, lead DB, customer DB, or customer/community portal DB?

Here's why that's important:  CAN SPAM Act.  It says a few things that you may want to monitor to keep your company out of hot water...

• Beyond including a postal address and an unsubscribe link that works, you must also pay attention to ...
• How you provide "opt-out" options.  If you do not provide specific opt-out options for every department or function that is sending emails, then when a user opts out, you must opt them out of EVERYTHING.  Currently you have 10 days to do that -- and that is being reduced to 7 very shortly (and we can guess that timeframe wiill continue to shorten).  So if you've got different departments using different ESP's, then you are advised to ensure that they can communicate that Do Not Email list and make sure they also get them updated accurately.

And if that's not enough, then take into account laws put in place in both Michigan and Utah, that say if you are sending emails for things like guns or weapons, adult content, etc., that you MUST check your email list against their supression file (a do-not-email list that parents can put their children's email addresses on), so that none of the "wrong" sort of emails get delivered to minors.  Here's the kicker -- those DB's are fee-based, soemthing like 7 cents per recipient in your email list.  Ouch!  If you're a B-to-C business that sends out any subject matter that they've outlined in their law, and have a list of 10,000 emails, that's an additional cost of $700 for sending to that list.

Check out an article about the laws imposed by Michigan and Utah, entitled "Michigan, Utah Impose Dreaded E-Mail Tax" posted at the Datamation website in July.

Now, as though that would be enough -- but there's this thorny issue about what are the "statistics" that are most useful when managing your email deliverability.  I spoke with Pivotal Veracity, which offers and partners with many ESP's, providing their deliverability statistics.  Here's what they said:

• As a base level, you want things like Number Emails Sent, Number that bounced, Number of emails opened, number of emails where a link was clicked.
• Added bonus is to do domain-level statistics -- so the same as above, but on a per-domain basis for each campaign sent.
• The BEST is to add the Placement data -- that is, where does your email get delivered at the major ISP's -- to the inbox, or to a junk mail folder?  This is what you can use that will help you determine things like where you could improve your email messages to get better results, and look at various opportunity costs that will assist you to improve your email communications.

So, it's a big world -- and it adds to your integration scenario, and introduces additional "systems" that need to be integrated to your marketing/customer/portal databases.  Knowing about all of this allows you to create workable solutions that are manageable in the total marketing systems mix.

Creating User Demand for Application Functionality

When IT implements a new system, it seems like users ought to be overjoyed at getting some new functionality that IT knows will make their lives easier and their business more streamlined.

Then how come three-quarters of CIO's say they achieve only 20-25% of their optimization goals?

Optimize Magazine's article, entitled "Process Optimization That Measures Up" by Bruce Rogow, points out a few things that are worth taking into account:

• IT people have become obsessed with a perspective that everything in the business can be reduced to a process diagram, can be improved, optimized or outsourced.  While process efficiency is important, it is only one element of any business.
• IT doesn't take into account what is necessary for effective human adoption.  The article points out that a number of IT shops are making new, elegant, enterprise architectures and applications available to their organizations.  But business executives and end users have not been allowed to participate in the process -- and these are the people who matter most to the end result.
• If IT continues to focus on "hard" process efficiencies, that narrow-minded view will get in the way of providing the true differentiation needed in the global competitive environment of today.

So if there's one thing to pay attention to when leveraging systems for business advantage -- and is really common sense when you think about it:  Systems exist inside of a larger whole -- and the whole system (i.e. business) needs to be taken into account.  Many executives think the leverage will happen by shifting to or incorporating an attention to the "softer" processes -- those things that don't follow a linear process -- like innovation, product design/development, marketing (check out the Marketing Interactions blog for awesome insights related to marketing systems), knowledge exploitation, among a longer list of functions.

In my experience, if IT can iterate through the development process, and follow up with end users about what they're using and what they're not -- and if they're not using it -- find out why, rather than try to force them to use something that apparently isn't working, then the ratio of optimization realization will go up remarkably.  In one case, I worked with the users to design the "perfect" implementation, or system for them -- but they weren't really using it.  I was wondering why, and I went to a meeting with the primary user for the system, and she had these Excel spreadsheet printouts.  I saw that was what she worked off of.  I asked her if we could output that format for her from the system, would it make the system more useful.  She was delighted at the idea of receiving an Excel spreadsheet formatted report -- and would never have thought to ask for that functionality -- but it made the whole difference in user adoption of the system.  But it took commitment and follow-through to figure that out.  Approach the conversations with end users from the standpoint that they want this optimization -- they want their life to be easier --- they want to be IT's partner.

I say -- hooray for the common sense approach of this article -- it's a step in a good direction! And a way of challenging yourself to think about how systems/applications and business processes interact and how the business and IT can work together to achieve the common objective.

The Case for Web Services

Excerpting from the book, "Securing Web Services with WS-Security" by Jothy Rosenberg and David Remy, who have a chapter called "The Gestalt of Web Services" here are the points that build the case for paying attention to Web Services:

You could say that the Internet is the most pervasive distributed computing infrastructure ever envisioned.  Based on surveys done in 2003 and 2004, from a variety of sources, here are some of the statistics:

• There are approximately 46 million registered Internet domain names.
• There are 172 million Internet hosts.
• More than 500,000 servers on the Internet have Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates in use.
• There are in excess of over 3 billion accessible web page documents.
• For every computer supporting a company's presence on the Internet, there are some number of internal servers that run the same web technologies.

The web has become the global network for information exchange.  If you do the math, as Web Services become pervasive, web services could affect almost 2 billion servers.

They go on to say, "Virtually every organization has invested in computing infrastructure (or pays fees to someone who has on its behalf) to support its participation in the Web.  Middleware that leverages this enormous investment and enormous commitment to a set of ubiquitous international standards will have an immediate acceptance unlike anything in computing history.  This is the main reason for Web Services' rapid adoption."

In his recent blog post, The Next Big Thing: Web services/SOA, Mitch Betts points to a Goldman Sachs Group report that is very bullish on web services, and cites results from a survey of 100 IT managers at Fortune 100 companies.

Optimize Magazine features a case study article about a Web Services/SOA implementation, "Building An SOA Pipeline" -- that provides one view into this journey.

Web Services integration takes thought, but is a very effective way to bring otherwise disparate systems together meaningfully.  It's something that anyone implementing or evaluating technology should be aware of as an option -- and require of their vendors -- or their IT groups who are writing and maintaining custom applications.

Application Integration and Web Services

Silos of information are out.  Integrated applications are in.  So how do you start?  Let’s take a look at integration technology called Web Services, and the issues that you’ll need to think about when integrating applications using this technology.

Web Services have been prominently talked about as the technology that allows an easier integration of applications – that works across platforms and implementation similarities.  So you can integrate a Java application with a .NET application in a fairly transparent manner.

Optimize Magazine recently published an article that examines “What’s Next for Web Services?” – and in a nutshell, says the following:

1. The need for flexibility is driving the interest --- yep.
2. Speed to deployment and reusability of services is nice too --- yep.
3. People are actually thinking about interoperability – how to actually have applications talk to one another – let’s call it the “Anti-Silo” Movement. – very refreshing.
4. There’s more interest in software architects and to designing a model-driven systems architecture that can bring different applications together in a thoughtful way – knowing that a system is always evolving –- don’t get lost in analysis paralysis – think “iterate”.
5. Pay attention to performance.
6. Pay attention to redundancy and uptime – absolutely!  A must-have for the view of reliability in the eyes of the users.
7. Pay attention to your user interface and the user experience, as you bring all this functionality together – the ongoing issue that is also ever-evolving.
8. Always think about having your systems be browser-based – absolutely… with the occasional need for hand-held support as well.

In my experience, exposing web services and writing web service clients to backend systems for point-to-point integration and customization is a very straight forward process – but it takes thought and communication to ensure that the methods exposed are understood.

The security issues are fairly straight forward to address, and having systems communicate across the Internet is not all that painful when you think about performance up front.

A recent blog post at ZDNet takes a broad look at Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), which is what encompasses Web Services, and the common issues found with web services implementations.  Check out “Politics, business, technology — in THAT order”.

In my view – any dialog with a vendor when evaluating software applications needs to look at the availability of a web services-based interface for integration.  Any vendor that doesn’t have this capability, should have a commitment to offering it as an option.  If they don’t, even if you like the functionality, maybe you’d be better served over the long haul to move on to a vendor who is interested in integrated applications that allow you to provide what you need to your end users.