Web Services Blueprint
The December 1, 2003 issue of InfoWorld magazine contains a special report that is labeled a blueprint for web services, drafting a plan for enterprise service-oriented architecture, and contains a set of design guidelines for implementing a service oriented architecture that is very practical and realistic. The report includes a set of tips for SOA design suggested by Brent Sleeper who is a principal at The Stencil Group consultancy. The report also includes an interesting sidebar by Jon Udell on the human aspects of web services. There is an important but frequently overlooked point to the issue of the human side of web services. With increasing frequency, web services are converging to represent business processes, and the idea of component reuse closely resembles the idea of designing workflow using a number of component web services to execute specific but generalized business processes.
It is not a simple matter to apply these principles in a criminal justice information system. The challenge is in the exceptions to the business process that are at the very root of the discretionary power that the law and practice envision for principals in the justice process. From the police officer making a discretionary arrest decision to the determination of a sentence for a particular offender, the variations so well managed in human terms are hard to state as variations in a web service business process abstraction. Udell rightly argues that the use of web services can help us manage the "screw-ups" better, but the importance of human judgement and discretionary decision-making have to be factored into the enterprise system architecture whether it is service oriented or not.
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