Are Web Services Really the Answer?

"Most large enterprises have paid billions of dollars to get to where they are today and they still can’t get answers to simple questions. This is pathetic. Enterprises try to do most anything. They try to reorganize; they try to change business policies or practices; they try to acquire a new company or move into a new market sector. And with all this, the number one challenge they have is IT. They’re told by the IT department, "Well, we just can’t do that now. You have to wait a couple of years." So it is not a pleasing experience when everything in the organization reacts except for IT. If you’re a CEO, you have every department business function with different technology that has different standards, different data definitions, different ERP methods, different semantics, different automation competencies. So when you try to do something that is cross-departmental or cross-functional, it is extremely hard to do. So the CEO has a right to say "If I paid billions, why can’t I get something that’s more reactive on a timely basis? Because I’m heavily dependent and I don’t have the option of going back to the 1970’s or going back to doing it manually."