| ------------------------------------- The eBusiness Bulletin e-newsletter of BrainStorm Group January 17, 2001 ------------------------------------- ==================================================== -- INTRODUCTION
==================================================== Web Services is the new buzzword in the business integration world. Web Services will do our integration for us, and allow cross platform and application integration throughout the enterprise according to the proponents. It can do all this, and more - but there's a price. This week we will cover two very interesting areas of development. Both fall under the generic umbrella term, "Web Services". Different vendors have different meanings for this term. Our first article by Darlene Brown is on Enterprise Portals. Portals are being created by many companies as part of their enterprise integration strategy and most are going forward with this effort with very little planning and few established goals or objectives. This could lead to disaster. An enterprise portal, Darlene points out, has virtually no limit on how big or encompassing it may become. An enterprise portal for a large company can easily cost as much as $500 Million! Companies are spending money creating enterprise portals because they think they are needed and because everyone else is doing it. Making an enterprise portal is NOT an easy task or a cheap one. Darlene Brown explains the whole portal dilemma in detail. Read about Darlene's presentation, then listen to the archive at BrainStormU. Our second article features Patrick Gannon of OASIS and discusses the building blocks for e-business Web Services. The infrastructure for e-business and web services rests on the many forms of XML and OASIS is the organization behind the open standards movement for the adoption of ebXML. OASIS and XML.org are central clearinghouses for accessing all the latest information on standards and schemas for XML, SGML and CGM. The standards are open and democratic because they are being used almost as fast as they are created and agreed upon. Patrick feels that what we are doing right now will affect the way software is written well into this new century. Read about Patrick's presentation then listen to the archive at BrainStormU. We are pleased to let you know the Chicago eBusiness Integration Conference, March 25-27, topical agenda has been posted. Lastly, watch upcoming issues for the unveiling of a new name and an improved format for the Bulletin. Make plans now to join us in March. As a service to those who could not attend our New York or San Francisco eBusiness Integration Conferences due to travel and other constraints caused by September 11, we have archived sessions from our San Francisco Event. We are pleased to bring these sessions to you for only $149 (an onsite value of $1495). They will be available to you on-demand for a full 60 days. You may revisit the sessions as often as you like, simply log-in each time to gain access. View the available sessions at: Register today - your satisfaction is guaranteed!
"Dar" began her presentation in San Francisco by reading the dictionary definition of portals, and then expanded it greatly by telling us how the word was being used for just about every initiative that involved business done on the Internet, which was accurate. They are all portals, because "portal" is a very loose term and can encompass all of the uses. But Dar warned that not all portals are equal. She reminded us of the eighties when CASE tools came in. For awhile, every new vendor offering was hyped with the word "case" and touted the benefits of making everything work better, faster and cheaper. Dar stated that the same thing is happening today with portal technology. Horizontal and Vertical Portals The first portals Dar discussed are the Internet or Web portals, which include the two basic categories of horizontal and vertical portals. An example of a horizontal portal is Yahoo, which has just about everything on it. You can start at Yahoo and go anywhere and get just about anything. A vertical portal, on the other hand, is a Web site dedicated to one specific area of interest. She used WebMD as an example, where there's a lot of medical information and links to other sources of medical information. A vertical portal is often a subset of a horizontal portal. iVillage.com is an example of a horizontal portal with a vertical audience. It has a lot of general information focused to the interests of women. Yahoo is so big; it is actually a "Megaportal". It is a great site, but not a very good portal model for the industry to follow. So what issues do you look at when you create your enterprise portal? Who is your audience and what service do you want to provide them? Dar says that her clients are telling her that they must have a portal because everybody else has one. But they have no idea of what kind of portal they need or even what they want it to do - they have no goals or objectives. Building your portal without specific goals and objectives is a very expensive process - because you will have to build the whole thing again when you finally learn what your goals and objectives are. Dar said that a company of 500 people could build an effective horizontal enterprise portal, but that for a large company it is probably impossible to make the portal all things to all people. Most enterprise portals will be vertical with segments for specific audiences and subject matter so you end up with an enterprise portal composed of multiple vertical portals. Internal and External Portals Another important distinction is the internal vs. the external portal. An internal portal is within the organization for the members of that organization. Here Dar again said that people are funding and building these portals without goals and objectives, simply because everyone is doing it. Without goals, scope creep is assured, and it is possible to spend millions trying to please everyone and still have a portal that doesn't work and doesn't really add value to the organization. She begged the audience, if they didn't understand what the goals were for their portal project to stop right now! She said there are only two reasons to create an internal portal, to increase productivity and operational efficiency. After all there is a lot that an internal portal can access. Employee information is one popular vertical, where employees can find out what their benefits are, or the forms they need to fill out. Everything that goes into a portal needs to pass the test of either increasing efficiency or productivity. Dar repeated often that you have to be very careful with the, "Wouldn't it be nice if we also had….." question, which will come up all the time. The way to lose control of costs and the whole project is by answering "yes" to that question. The external enterprise portal is where you open the portal to your suppliers and customers and the people who need information about your organization and what you do. The requirements for an external portal are different. Currently the emphasis is on how the portal can make money and how you can allow outsiders access to self-service through your data. Dar reminded everyone that an enterprise portal is the window into your company targeted to a specific audience. The most important thing is that it benefits your enterprise. Next, Dar covered the role of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and portals. She defined EAI as making independently designed and deployed systems work together and it includes customers, legacy custom applications, ASP's, acquired applications, purchased packages, end user application development, suppliers, distributors and branch offices. In addition, there are disparate platforms and operating systems to be integrated as well. The portal can be the window to all of these things. But Dar gave a big caveat to this by saying that despite what vendors might say about their products, you cannot integrate at the portal level. The portal doesn't make things work as a whole; it makes things APPEAR to work as a whole. After all, it really is just a virtual window into your enterprise. Building Functionality The functionality's that are needed to make this work are search, aggregation, personalization, "push", collaboration and workflow. Executing a search is more complicated than it sounds because you have to be able to find different applications written by many people on disparate systems and programs. Dar said it is frustrating to build a search capability, and then find that it returns over a thousand documents for a simple search, all with only a 10% relevancy. Searches have to find what the users need, quickly. Aggregation and personalization need to be designed for the users needs. Push technology needs to work from the organization to the user. Push sends information to the people who need it when they need it, rather than just putting it on the site and hoping everyone gets to it sooner or later. Collaboration is creating a way for the people who work on common things to get together and share information. What is actually happening here is more than just integrating applications. You are integrating work processes and information and gathering together the knowledge within an organization. Critical Success Factors Critical success factors are security, consistency, user interfaces and multiple device support. Multiple devices need to be supported for PDA's and others. Consistency is critical since the general rule is that everything we are hoping to integrate is inconsistent. Vendors can be very helpful here by producing templates that are consistent throughout the organization. The user interface is a huge issue - everyone is familiar with badly designed interfaces where completing a simple process can be difficult. Dar recommends getting a lot of help. She admitted to the audience that when Gartner first delivered their GartnerWeb it was the ugliest sight she had ever seen. Eventually, Gartner went out and hired some experts to improve on it. The Four Stages of Portal Development Dar covered the costs involved in creating an enterprise portal in four ascending phases. She reminded everyone again that there are many claims that portals will make everything work better and cheaper, but the reality is that they cost money and are difficult to build. The lowest phase is an entry-level portal that contains the company data, search capability and miscellaneous links. The fourth and highest phase has procurement, e-markets and contiguous access. Dar warned that if you start your portal effort at the fourth phase, you will fail. Start at the bottom. Here is where you really have to fight the "Wouldn't it be nice to have…" people. Decide what you are going to do, make it functional, fix what doesn't work, improve it, and then think about moving to the next phase. Phase two has advanced search, personalization, and extensive information. Phase three has customer support, transactions, collaboration and workflow. Gartner puts the investment of a phase three level site at 1 to 3 million dollars. As you move from one phase to the next, the number of applications and data stores are steadily increasing. For a phase four enterprise portal, the cost is anywhere from 3 to 500 million dollars! This is very serious money and another reason why you don't want to start at phase four. There is literally no ceiling - you can put the whole world on your site if you want to, and if you say "yes" every time some says, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had …" you probably will. She said most organizations are at phase two moving toward phase three with hardly anyone at stage four. She has seen many stage three efforts that have failed and these companies have had to start over at phase one. They didn't begin with goals or objectives but just started gluing things together. The Challenges The challenges are security, integration, technologies, standards, vendor proliferation and technology immaturity/multiplicity. What is needed for security is single-sign-on. Most organizations don't have a single security repository, but have IDs, passwords and permissions scattered all over the place and sometimes controlled by people outside the organization. With integration you are dealing with all kinds of platforms and languages and there are hundreds of different vendor portal offerings. Dar emphasized that you need to write your goals and objectives before you go shopping for the technology. The best technology in the world won't make a poorly conceived, directionless plan work. The technologies are good, but there is an infinite number of things a portal can be, and without control it will get out of hand. Dar told the audience that she wasn't telling them to not build an enterprise portal - she said they all should do it, and everyone is starting one, but to save yourself loads of grief by planning it right in the beginning. First define the expected value for the business, then build the internal portal. Once it is running well, move to the external. Build a pilot and make sure the pilot can scale. An enterprise portal is a dynamic entity that will change from day to day. Links to customers and suppliers are always changing and if a customer or supplier builds a new web site, that means more work for you. Prototype everything before you make it live, and plan for complexity and cost. It will be expensive, but does have value. There is the financial value, strategic value, relationship value, competitive value, functional value, usage value, process value and technical value. To find out how these values are defined, register and listen to Dar's talk at
BrainStormU.
================================================== WHAT COULD YOU DO WITH $100 BUCKS IN CHICAGO? Early registrants will receive a $100 American Express Gift Cheque! Use Priority Code EBB102 when you call 508-393-3266 to register! ================================================= Patrick J. Gannon is President and CEO of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). It is a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML. In addition to serving on the OASIS board, he was also appointed to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, where he chairs a team advising governments in transitional economies on electronic business practices. Why Web Services is Different Patrick began his presentation by pointing out that distributed processing across Wide Area Networks is almost 30 years old and electronic commerce through EDI has been with us for more than 20 years, therefore Web Services is more an evolutionary trend then a revolution. With Web Services it's possible to componentize applications and plug and play different applications from different vendors in order to create these dynamic services. The potential impact of this is great however, because it will change the way software is developed and deployed more than anything else has in the last thirty years. What OASIS Does OASIS creates and offers open standards for building system interoperability specifications focusing on standards for XML, SGML and CGM. The OASIS process for standards is open, democratic and vendor-neutral and the results are guaranteed to be representative of the industry as a whole. OASIS offers a venue for much faster time to market by creating the infrastructure to get a new standard or specifications on the fast track and they help with the implementation and adoption of new standards. OASIS and the other sites such as SML.org provide a good place to learn about how to deploy Web Services for various industries and companies. XML.org XML.org is a central clearinghouse for accessing XML schemas, vocabularies and related documents. It is a self-supporting, non-commercial resource for the community at large and it fosters collaboration among the industries. According to Patrick, it will take an international effort to make XML work. This culminated in the development of ebXML, which defines business processes as models expressed in XML. Business messages are also expressed in XML. The parameters for trading partner agreements to interface with each other are also expressed in XML, as are the business service interfaces which implement those agreements. Transport and routing layers move the XML data between partners and a registry/repository provides the "container" for the process models, vocabularies and data. This is being sponsored by UN/CEFACT - the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. UN/CEFACT sets the worldwide policy and technical development in facilitating electronic trade. They developed the international EDI standard, UN/EDIFACT and are using that as the infrastructure for this new effort. They are planning to officially accredit ebXML when it is completed. OASIS is the largest independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the standardization of XML and operates the XML.org registry which is an open community clearinghouse of XML applications. He quoted several magazine as saying that ebXML is our best bet to establish an international e-business standard. Timeline and Progress of ebXML The specifications for ebXML were completed in May of 2001 and are available at www.ebxml.org. Infrastructure work is continuing on messaging, collaborative partnerships, interoperability, implementation and conformance. What is different about this effort is the speed with which it is being implemented. Because it is open standards, as soon as the specifications were released the vendors already had tested applications that could be used and as they tested their demos, refinements would go back to the specifications groups and would be shared with others for further refinement. The Working Committees Technical committees for OASIS are working on the areas of access control (XACML), Security Services (SAML), Business Transactions (BTP), ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registrym ebXML CPPA, ebXML Implementation and Conformance and the Universal Business Language (UBL). For Web Services specifically, OASIS is working on provisioning services which is maintaining centralized user information, and a Web Services Component Model. Patrick feels there is a great need to provide the proper specifications to enable the kind of Web Services being developed. The standards areas are committed to supporting these efforts and OASIS is the leader in interoperable standards. Sources: The most current status of each technical committee can be seen at: The technical committee mail list archives are at: BrainStorm Group's Conferences are the ONLY executive forums featuring:
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