E-nabling the E-conomy

The world is moving from an economy based on the interactions of people to an E-conomy characterized by the interactions of software services. This change promises enormous gains in productivity and substantial reductions in process times. In the E-conomy, people will decide what needs to be done, and software will determine the best way to do it. The emerging web services standards are key to getting us there. Today, getting services from different organizations to interact over the Internet is difficult, special-case work. Part of the difficulty is that each provider addresses a common set of problems in a proprietary way. Using the standards defined by the web services effort makes it easier to produce, operate, and use compositions of services. Web services standards will allow us to think of all applications as e-services that we can assemble on the fly to solve our problems. In this talk, I'll discuss the components of the Economy, the interaction among these components, and where the evolving web services standards fit in.