Five Questions You Need to Ask

Senior managers need to ensure that their organizations' executives are thinking ahead about the implications of the Web services architecture. Here are five questions you can use to spur your people:

Does our management team have a shared vision of the long-term (five to ten years out) business implications of the new IT architecture?

Do we have transition plans that balances the state of the architecture's development with a clear understanding of the areas of highest business impact?

Are we moving fast enough today to build our expertise and exploit immediate opportunities for streamlining intercompany processes, outsourcing activities in which we don't have distinctive capabilities and designing Web services that we can market to other companies?

Do we have a clear understanding of the obstacles within our organization that may hinder us from exploiting the full value of the new IT architecture, and do we have initiatives underway to overcome these obstacles?

Are we exerting sufficient leadership in shaping both the functionality offered by providers of Web services (defining, for example, the performance levels required for mission-critical applications) and the standards needed to collaborate with our partners?

Excerpted with permission from "Your Next IT Strategy," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 9, October 2001.