WISRD 2002
Workshop on Information Systems Research and Development
The Future for Web Services
April 19-21, 2002
UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center

Conference Summary

Many thanks to Burt Swanson and his special guest John Hagel for a workshop with rich insights on a very important topic for information systems (IS) researchers and strategists.

WISRD 02, held at UCLA's resort at Lake Arrowhead was focused on Web Services (WS) and featured a talk by John Hagel III (Your Next IT Strategy, Harvard Business Review, October 2001), a presentation of research-in-progress by Chris Langdon, and several plenary and group discussions over a two-day period. The audience consisted of IS researchers from UCLA, UC Irvine, USC, Claremont Graduate University, and UT Austin, as well as industry guests.

Emergent WS issues were explored and discussed at multiple levels: (1) the technology level, (2) the business process layer, (3) the enterprise layer, and (4) the overall market level.

Special guest John Hagel III presented his insights on “Creating Economic Value with Web Services.”		Prof. Chris Langdon, USC, presented research-in-progress with a .NET-based WS prototype.
WISRD founder and host, Prof. Burt Swanson, UCLA, led the discussion about the “Future of Web Services.”		The audience of IS researchers from UCLA, UC Irvine, USC, Claremont Graduate University, and UT Austin, as well as industry guests at UCLA’s resort at Lake Arrowhead.
(Pictures by Marco Alvarado, Anderson School at UCLA)

Some of the key insights include:

• WS is a concept for distributed computing architectures and differs from its predecessors, such as OMG's (Object Management Group, www.omg.org) Common Object Request Broker Architecture(CORBA), in that it has been explicitly designed for the Internet. Thus, it uses Internet and Web protocols, such as HTTP and URL, as well as other common IT standards in the area of distributed systems, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This, in turn, provides a significant installed base of components and therefore may ease WS development and the diffusion of WS-based implementations.
• The use of many open and common IT standards can greatly improve the flexibility of information systems while maintaining high levels of systems integration. However, compared with other architectures for distributed systems such as CORBA or J2EE it currently does not provide certain functions/methods in areas that are typically important for the support of mission-critical business processes, such as security and workflow management features.
• WSs can allow for new outsourcing business models if they can be designed to be easily "plugged" into legacy infrastructure. However, support for service provider-specific business processes, such as metering, monitoring, billing, and auditing, is currently still missing.
• WSs can allow for new intermediary business models, such as brokers. In an exemplary scenario, a broker could use a WS to improve the efficiency of orchestrating many different business activities in a fragmented market with a long value chain.
• Overall, if WSs can reduce transaction costs, then they can increase the division of labor and specialization throughout industry (as indicated, for example, by Malone et al.) and therefore lead to a widespread unbundling and reorganization of corporations. Malone et al. showed that IT investments can reduce external coordination cost more than internal and thus can provide incentives for specialization strategies (Malone, T. W., J. Yates, and R. I. Benjamin. 1987. Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies. Communications of the ACM 30(6): 484-497).

For additional information about Web services, please visit our SIGABIS Research Area # 3 on Web Services.

Conference Announcement (January 2002)

Since 1993, WISRD -- a small, annual, invitation-only workshop -- has brought together Information Systems faculty, doctoral students, and alumni of four major Information Systems research programs in Southern California for mutual learning on a theme of current interest. Among the benefits of the Workshop are professional relationships and collaborations that continue throughout the year. The Workshop is organized and funded in part by the Information Systems Research Program at UCLA. Claremont Graduate University, The University of California at Irvine, and The University of Southern California also participate.

For WISRD 2002 our focal topic will be The Future for Web Services. Our special guest is John Hagel III, business consultant and author, and until recently the chief strategy officer of 12 Entrepreneuring. John is co-author (with John Seely Brown--chief scientist of Xerox Parc) of the article "Your Next IT Strategy" (Harvard Business Review, October 2001, 105-113) describing the emergent Web Services architecture and its likely organizational impacts. How big does this change promise to be? According to the authors, "The technology providers are not making empty promises: They're backing up their words with massive investments to help create the infrastructure needed to make the new IT approach work. As these efforts continue, over the next year or two, a steady stream of new, Internet-based services will come on-line. […] Slowly but surely, all your old assumptions about IT management will be overturned" (Hagel and Brown 2001, 105-106). Together at WISRD, we will explore this bold claim, addressing the many facets of Web Services and its architectural and technical foundations, and, in particular, sharing our thoughts on the implications of this innovation for our own research.

The Workshop begins on late afternoon on Friday and ends mid-day on Sunday. Participants are expected to participate in the full program. No facilities are available for attendee's family members or friends. The registration fee is $250, which covers lodging for two nights (double occupancy) and all meals. The Workshop's other expenses are paid by UCLA's Information Systems Research Program.

WISRD attendance is limited to 30 invited participants. For further information please contact Marco Alvarado, Anderson School at UCLA (marco.alvarado@anderson.ucla.edu).