Rating: 
Summary: Still early days for business models for web services
Review: The story in web services to date has been told by the technologists. That is why we see an endless supply of articles about XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the rest of the WSxL alphabet soup. Ditto for the .NET vs. Java wars. It's time to transition from architectures and protocols to business models - how does any of this help to run a business faster, better, cheaper? Enter John Hagel, who spent sixteen years as a Partner with McKinsey, and has recently set up his own consultancy company. Hagel starts by noting that web services is the first IT technology which supports an organic and self-adaptive organisational model of the enterprise. Hagel introduces "the Service Grid". Above the computing and network protocols there is a conceptually-distinct layer of functionality which has to be there to make web services fly. We need solutions to problems such as: security; transaction integrity; billing; orchestration of functions; and in particular ontologies - the standardisation of the meanings of entities and attributes within and between businesses. (Note the "semantic web" activity in W3C). Many people assume web services are just a re-run of the "application service provision" experiment we saw a couple of years ago. In chapter 3, Hagel provides an excellent review of the ASP wave, the business requirements which drove it and the reasons why the experiment failed. Business were keen to move from a license to a subscription model, they wanted to use enterprise application services without investing in technology and operations. But CIOs were worried about the performance and security of Internet-provided applications, and concerned that if ASPs went out of business, their own companies would be left in a lurch (and the CIO would lose his/her job!). Although the technologies of web services are still in their infancy, some people out there are using them. In chapters 4 and 5, Hagel describes Dell's continuous improvement of its supply chain using web service interfaces to talk with its supplier systems. He points out that existing applications can be upgraded to expose their interfaces as web services to support new business processes relatively easily and cheaply. Generalizing from his Dell example, Hagel argues that web services will be introduced from the edge of the enterprise, later penetrating the core. The "edge" is that part of the enterprise which deals with the environment: customers, suppliers, partners. The alternative view is that web services will see early introduction within the enterprise itself, as CIOs exploit the power of web service interfaces to kick-start enterprise application automation (EAI) for legacy systems, which to-date has been just too difficult, costly and time-consuming. In chapter 6, Hagel uses the examples of Cisco and Nike to examine "process networks". The situation where an orchestrator (dominant company with market power) controls the activities of a veritable keiretsu of partners in its industry value-net. Not via micro-management or direct administrative power, more through "certification, coaching, promoting or dropping based on overall partnership performance". In chapter 7 Hagel turns his attention to the enterprise itself. Most enterprises, Hagel observes, are coalitions of three very different kinds of business. Firstly a customer relationship business focused on "share of wallet" (customer-centric); secondly an operations business focused on low-cost, economies of scale and routine (process-centric); and thirdly a product development business focused on creativity and innovation (new-product-centric). These three business types have different drivers, cultures and types of people. Many commentators have pointed out that enterprises have to decide if their focus is to be "customers, price or product" and that it's foolhardy to try to be a bit of everything. Why not unbundle these functions into separate enterprises? Conventionally the answer is that excessive transaction costs load the scales in favour of retaining vertical integration of these functions. However, visionaries have long argued that eBusiness, with its dramatically decreased transaction costs, will permit a generalised outsourcing model leading in the limit to the virtual corporation. Hagel's view is that rather than atomization of enterprises, we can expect to see significant consolidation, particularly in the areas of customer relationship and operations-focused companies, where strong economies of scale exist. Concluding, Hagel has a vision of the web-services-enabled company moving over a period to a fluid, decoupled "process-network"-type architecture. I imagine this will work for some companies and not for others. Company architectures are solutions to multiple complex constraints, and web services modify the parameters of some of them, but leave others unchanged. Conclusion John Hagel writes in the fluid style of the McKinsey consultant, short sentence constructions embedding abstract nouns and appropriately well-judged adjectives. But it's so bland that at the end of a long day, one can barely keep one's eyes moving along the lines of the pages. It's hard to know what to advise. The parts which read best are the case studies, where the arguments are locked into real experiences. Perhaps the problem is that the ratio of ideas to words is just too low. Is this a book about business trends or is it a book about web services? There is a reasonably familiar story about eBusiness, the "frictionless economy" and the industry-architectural consequences of increased service velocity and very low transactional costs. Anyone who has looked at web services has experienced the "aha" feeling that at last we know what will actually make eBusiness work. Except that eBusiness and web services are both very much works in progress. We don't know exactly how web services will transform business, and we don't know exactly how the needs of eBusiness will shape and form web services. This book is a great scene-setter at some level of generality, (although it is too long), but it flies a little high over the terrain, and we don't seem to see where the major issues will be over the next two to three years. I guess that book remains to be written.
Rating: 
Summary: Great intro to web services for non-techie
Review: This book did the best job of anything I've read in describing what web services is, the history behind it and what it means for businesses.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Yet
Review: This book is definitely well written, but web services went the way of the Internet Bubble. Both John Hagel and John Seely Brown tried unsuccessfully to make a commercial splash in the web services world at their previous venture 12 Entrepreneuring. Great book on a topic that has come and gone. Question the sources - if they really believe what they've written then why couldn't they make it work?
Rating: 
Summary: Good read but misses the "Aha!"
Review: This book is well written, but in the end, I missed seeing the Aha! factor. Nothing particularly earth shattering that I walked away with afterI plonked down my thirty bucks for this book. The authors make a keen attempt to differentiate Web services from ASPs...a technology that never quite lived up to its hype. Their arguments about the fundamental aspects of why Web services will change the world are unconvincing. However, there are a few gems to walk away with. First, the notion of modular architectures, and thier impact on organizational flexibility. Second, the importance of standards around the Web that compenstate for the lack of standards in across-firm infrastructures. I guess this is a moderate buy, provided you do not go in expecting to see Hagel in his full force (remember his earlier books were quite phenomenal in this regard). For the readers of HBR, you will find the essence of this book distilled in two recent articles by Hagel. As a side note, Seely Brown is listed as the coauthor: this is misleading because he only wrote the preface.
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Summary: It's NOT About Technology
Review: Too many people perceive Out of the Box as a "technology" book. To some extent, John Hagel fosters this impression by using a sub-title that focuses on Web services technology. In fact, this is a very insightful book on business strategy - both on the substance of business strategy and the process of business strategy. This insight is starting to be recognized - Strategy and Business (the publication of Booz Allen Hamilton) recently designated Out of the Box as one of the Best Business Books of 2002 and they placed it firmly in the Strategy category. Anyone interested in strategy needs to read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: good insight, not much to execute on
Review: Well Hagel has managed to as least salvage some of the venture money that was pumped into 12 Entrepreneuring. So THIS is what he was working on for the 2 years he was there. A solid documentation of all of the work that he and the employees did. And he is smart to be making some $ from the whole thing. My sense is that Hagel is selling his reputation with this book, and not much content, and certainly less actionable content. I don't think John Seely Brown wrote anything other than the preface. The good news is that there are several clear "bullet point" type of take-aways... but nothing that isn't obvious. In summary, Hagel is a classic consultant: very good at talking about what to do and deducing "notions" --- but there is a definite business execution component missing. I'd pass on the book.
Rating:
Summary: Strategic
Review: Well, Web services won't change the world, but maybe some important aspects of it. We are still using paper, even though web-sides are extensively used for information retrieval. So, companies will still need technical stuff to keep their own infrastructure running and up-to-date, even though they might be able to buy external Web services. But this technical stuff is maybe doing different things, at least for a part, and/or it will do things differently. This book helps non-technical people to get a good idea of these upcoming changes. It helps to set the right priorities, to make choices, what to do, and what not. In the light of this expectation the reader may have, it's very good written and may be used as a model for your own reasoning. The technical concepts of Web services are not really new, but new is the potential of having them implemented on a global basis, this, from my point of view, is the innovative point of this story. Ex.: Just imagine to "plug in" a web service for language translation (engl. to chin.) of a translator at Peking. You would book his service, integrate it in your own process with very little technical overhead. That's new. (BTW, everything that was written, I am currently realizing. So, the arguments are real and evident. It's BPR combined with IT at work.)
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