Q&A: GM's CTO outlines Web services strategy

Computerworld - Tony Scott, chief technology officer of the information systems and services organization at General Motors Corp., spoke with Computerworld about the automaker's plans for Web services technology, the expected benefits from them and the possible risks GM hopes to avoid. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Do you feel Web services have been overhyped? I would not write off any technology that the likes of Microsoft and Sun and other large companies like IBM have invested hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars or so in R&D. The likelihood is pretty good that it's going to hang around and be something significant.
At GM, we're interested in it from a number of different perspectives. We've all lived through the embryonic stages of the Web and all the EAI [enterprise application integration] tools and the big application packages, so we don't see Web services as the panacea, the end-all, be-all that's going to replace everything else. But it does fit, or appear to fit, in the Web development space in particular, where we can take certain kinds of activities that we're embedding in each and every application we build today and externalize them as a service and only do, for example, maintenance and repair on that service in one place vs. in hundreds of applications.

Can you cite an example? Obviously, every car has a vehicle identification number. And there are dozens if not hundreds of applications in GM that use vehicle identification numbers for something as a part of our normal business process. There's a whole set of business rules around vehicle identification numbers -- good ones, bad ones, when the vehicle was made, its repair history, all kinds of things. And today, we have to embed lots of business logic and rules in every single application that uses vehicle identification numbers.
One of the things we are working toward is creating a vehicle identification number Web service that in effect will encapsulate all of the logic and business rules and so on -- let's call them the big rules around vehicle identification number -- so that you don't have to support and maintain that in hundreds of applications.
The positive benefits of that on quality, on consistency and so on, I think you can probably imagine. It's pretty significant. And there are, in a large company like GM, dozens of examples -- whether it's people or parts or locations or airline tickets or whatever -- where there's redundant logic, redundant business rules, redundant overhead and maintenance and support costs