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GCN Home > 06/28/04 issue

Web services need push from the top, experts say

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The cicada-like buzz over Web services during the past year will be nothing but background noise until the CIO Council and the Office of Management and Budget make Web services an official part of how the government does business, OMB’s former IT chief says.

Mark Forman, former OMB administrator for e-government and IT, said the move to Web services through a service-oriented architecture would save the government tens of millions of dollars and ensure security.

It also would deliver better services to citizens by letting agencies share software for similar operations rather than buying new licenses and customizing code.

But many agencies have been reluctant to give up control of their software and don’t fully understand the details of the service-sharing architecture, he said.

“Agencies must decide whether they want to own and manage their own applications and software code or do the function through Web services,” said Forman, now executive vice president of Cassatt Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif. “OMB needs to say, ‘Use Web services,’ and build a policy around it.”

Venkatapathi Puvvada, chief technology officer for Unisys Corp.’s global public sector unit, said agencies are showing a lot of interest in using Web services.

But OMB, the General Services Administration and other agencies need to first adopt open standards such as the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol, Web Services Directory Language and Simple Object Access Protocol, he said.

Agencies also should provide incentives to get software vendors to follow the standards, he said.

“There has to be a lot of critical mass to embrace these standards,” Puvvada said. “There needs to be more detail in the Federal Enterprise Architecture and the rationalization of components so agencies know what they are and how they work.”

Reusable components

The CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee is finalizing a white paper on reusable components that will give agencies a strategy on how to more easily share software.

A component is anything from basic computer code for a simple function to an entire application performing multiple, complex functions.

Kim Nelson, the co-chairwoman of the committee and Environmental Protection Agency CIO, said OMB is reviewing the paper. After OMB’s analysis, the council’s executive committee will complete the paper and send it to agencies.

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