The wonder of web services

When Tony Blair laid down his e-government objective of having all public services online by 2005, what he was really saying is that there are millions of proprietary government systems that need to be joined in comprehensive ways, to provide a higher level of communication between public bodies, citizens and businesses.

These underlying objectives of e-government remain - but three big problems stand in the way of every public sector technologist:

• Although some things have been achieved, most e-government systems still need to be completed.

• Whitehall is losing interest in electronic projects.

• The money available for e-government will soon dry up.

If the truth be told, and despite a large budget for the e-Envoy's office, the 2005 deadline is in grave danger of being a non-event.

It's very difficult to extract information from government systems, and very difficult to share information generally.

Government portals are distinguished by how little they do, in terms of linking systems from diverse government departments. This issue wouldn't be as much of a problem if it wasn't for the fast-approaching 2005 deadline.

E-government has not yet entered its stride, and even though there is likely to be less funding, Whitehall will not budge on that 2005 deadline.

Unfortunately, that leaves the ordinary public sector IT professional with a massive challenge:

• You will have to continue joining un-joinable applications.

• You will have to continue sharing un-shareable databases.

• And you will have even less money than before for delivering miracles.

What you need is a silver bullet: the bad news is that there isn't one. But every cloud has a silver lining, and that comes in the form of web services.

Web services can help public sector organisations achieve strategic benefits.

This can include putting key information into the hands of employees through role-based portals, reduced customer service spending through self-service, and reduced administration spend through internal self-service interfaces.

None of these benefits are new in themselves, but web services simplify an organisation's ability to deliver IT. Web services can also reduce the costs of delivery, giving technologists more room to manoeuvre.

So what will you need to take advantage of these benefits? Here's the good news - you won't need a whole new skills set to implement web services effectively.

What you do need is a decent grounding in orchestrating business processes.

All the business process re-engineering skills that were fashionable in the early 1990s, and then retreated to a handful of premier systems integrators at the turn of the century, are now important again as organisations use web services to rethink how to share and integrate processes across departmental and application boundaries.

The specific skills you should concentrate on are business process management, interface design and asynchronous messaging. But you also need some business skills, because you need to be able to construct a business case for web services projects that can deliver return on investment inside six months.

You'll also need to be able to involve senior management in a discussion aimed at creating closer but cheaper links with citizens, businesses and government suppliers. Using web services is not without its complications, especially when it comes to handling processes and dealing with security.

But you can't expect reward without some risk. If web services can join the un-joinable and share the un-shareable, then the risks will be worth it.

Jyoti Banerjee is chief executive of UK research company MyBusiness.Net