(January 10, 2002) - Web services, say two contributors to this month's Harvard Business Review, represent "an entirely new approach to corporate information systems" in which "the distinction between users and suppliers of Web services will fade."

The distinguished authors. John Hagel III and John Seely Brown. say in their 9-page article "Your Next IT Strategy" that while companies have traditionally viewed their information systems as proprietary buying or leasing their own hardware and writing or licensing their own applications, Web services changes everything.

Currently, say Hagel and Brown, companies hire big staffs to keep everything running. "This approach has many flaws," the authors write, "It's cumbersome and expensive and hinders collaboration. But there's been no alternative," they continue, "Until now. "

Hagel is coauthor of the bestselling books Net Worth and Net Gain, and Brown is director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. So when they confidently predict that "Rather than own and maintain all of their own hardware and software, companies will soon buy their information technologies as services provided over the Internet," the business world can be reasonably certain that they are right.

For the benefit of anyone who may doubt their assertion, they lay out a step-by-step approach for adopting the new architecture, based on the experiences of companies that are already transitioning to the new architecture, such as Merrill Lynch, General Motors, and Dell Computer. "As the new architecture matures," the authors conclude, "the location of particular capabilities and applications will become less important than executives' ability to discover and orchestrate these capabilities to deliver greater value to customers."
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