Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Consulting in Web Services is up...

I don't need Gartner to tell me that more companies are buying consulting around web services - I just ask my sales team. And the news is good. More and more companies are calling us to kick off engagements.

The majority of what we are seeing right now is actually driven by the web service vendors. Companies that supply web service platforms, networks, security, transformation and management platforms have been asking us to help with client engagements. This is great news. It means that the product vendors are selling their products and the engagements are large enough to bring in hired guns.

We are also seeing new engagements where we are helping companies:
- Define a roadmap for becoming 'service oriented'
- Evaluate web service vendors & packages
- Integrate systems using web service technology
- Define corporate standards, policies and procedures around web services
- Educate internal staff on web service technologies

The most interesting area where we are getting involved is in helping companies create whole new methodologies around what we call a "Business Driven Architecture". Here, we discuss business strategy and measurements. This moves into identifying key business processes that they would like integrated / automated. We then spend time creating new artifacts to describe Digital Process Execution. From here, we create a service network to act as a substrate. Lastly, we 'service enable' legacy applications and orchestrate them to support the desired 'to be' business process.

It really feels good to give customers a BPM solution that is built the *right* way.

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