Can BizTalk Convert Ordinary EDI Apps Into Web Services?

We last saw the "Your way is good...but it could be better" marketing message with regard to Silverlight (JavaScript is nice, AJAX is even better, but boy, you'll just love C#). With BizTalk, the recognition is that if Web services were going to have taken off in the enterprise under their own power, they would have done so seven years ago when the whole idea started.

Part of the reason for that was the native separation between business developers and applications developers. Historically, the people who created the logic behind businesses weren't programmers. Naturally, programmers were charged with the duty of producing code that conformed to the way businesses worked. Conformity is key to EDI. That's how it's always been.

So when Web services first had the opportunity to supplant business processes at the turn of the decade, they failed. Programmers weren't the ones trusted to redefine their businesses - they weren't the ones with the MBAs.

Microsoft may have realized this fact, which is why it's building Web services tools that appeal not so much to developers but to a different segment of computer users entirely, as Steven Martin explained:

"The three most powerful and prevalent modeling tools in existence today, in order of use, are paper, PowerPoint, and Visio. What we routinely hear from customers is that, when they do invest time and do document their processes, they lose a lot of richness once they go from that paper/PowerPoint/Visio scenario into their application logic. So as [Microsoft Senior Vice President] Bob [Muglia] indicated in the keynote, one of the things that we need to invest deeply in is bringing those two worlds together so that we are delivering a set of tools that really reflect the business model that's implemented, and allowing people to participate in changing that, versioning that, maintaining that."

Over the last ten to fifteen years, Martin continued, businesses implemented scores of pre-packaged applications, all of which had a serious impact on their productivity and how they work, but few of which made a real dent in the resources they use to make work productive in the first place. When unique business processes needed to be crafted -- "one-offs," if you will, such as Wal-Mart developing a distribution system for goods shipped to Hurricane Katrina survivors -- they needed access to their business logic in a more granular, tactile fashion.

Enter the modeling tool, which Martin contends is what made Visio so useful in the enterprise for process modeling, when it wasn't really created for that purpose originally.

"For the couple of processes that make a business truly unique," he told us, "they're recognizing they're going to build [them], they're recognizing they need to own the workflow associated with that so that they have good visibility into what they are, and that's what's putting the scrutiny on models. With a packaged application, you don't necessarily care whether you're shooting for operational excellence rather than process excellence. And so what we're seeing is, the world is dividing itself between core processes and commodity processes."

This is a very interesting distinction which deserves closer examination. Commodity processes are typically serviced by off-the-shelf applications, for which the customer needs no knowledge about their manner of operation or workflow or discipline. But they don't represent business functions. Core processes are different: "You need to own that logic; you need to version it; you need to maintain it," said Martin, repeating a trio of verbs he'd used a handful of other times during the interview. "You need to have very deep insight into what it does, [as opposed to EDI's] data in/data out model. You need to own it.

"The organizations that are doing that well are doing that using service orientation for those applications," he continued, "and their IT departments are investing a disproportionate amount of their time on those core things and finding ways to outsource those commodity things as much as they possibly can - things that don't differentiate them."

Microsoft's core goal in all of this remains to migrate its customers toward what it considers a better way of working - a way that is principally facilitated by and through Microsoft. But in its latest attempt to reach this goal through BizTalk, the company has made a dramatic change in its tack, moving from an appeal to developers to change the world to an appeal to managers to change process models to adapt to their own best practices. In so doing, one may wonder if it's Microsoft that has moved the furthest in this migration process.