Government agencies are turning increasingly to Web services to speed application development, share data and conduct transactions more easily.
The move complements federal and state efforts to standardize IT on open standards, such as the Federal Enterprise Architecture and the object-oriented software repositories states use to share and reuse code.
As a universal, cross-platform, multivendor standard, Web services, at least in theory, help agencies meet the twin goals of data security and IT efficiency by keeping their databases securely in-house, rather than moving them around.
There may be security concerns at the outer layers — at the Web, that is — but data is centralized. The software to access it, however, consists of widely distributed, easily programmed Web services, assembled like building blocks to make larger applications.
