Men, Women, and Web Services

You've probably heard the statement that when it comes to communication, men are from Mars, while women are from Venus? A concept straight from the title of a book by John Gray, this highlights an idea made popular by Deborah Tannen (You Just Don't Understand) in 1990. When men and women try to communicate, they often seem to be from different planets.

On the other hand, I bet this is the first time you've heard of the idea that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and web services are from Betelgeuse. :-) That's the title of a paper (in PDF format) that I found while surfing around on the web. The authors extend the theme to the problems of communicating between legacy applications and new Web applications.

Trying to manage business transactions with your partners when everyone is running their proprietary software on different platforms? Simple, flexible interoperability is the “holy grail” and happens to be analogous to the challenges we all face when we try to communicate with the opposite sex. Loosely based on the Mars-Venus theme, we will explain the basics, benefits and challenges of creating or migrating to a Web services standard-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). We will extend that theme to communication with people from other cultures/languages as an analogy to cross-enterprises B2B Web Services.

The authors also touch, albeit lightly, on an aspect to the communication "problem" that I would have liked to see explored further in terms of applications and interfaces.

Even early on, young girls tend to view themselves as an individual in a network – all entities in the network are different, yet equal and all are interdependent. One-to-one communication is a vehicle for achieving connection and degrees of intimacy. On the other hand, young boys immediately recognize themselves as members of a hierarchy, and as children, lower members of the tree. Conversation is designed primarily to establish position in the hierarchy – who has the upper hand? Relationships are viewed as asymmetrical; even close friends need to view themselves as superior to each other to some extent. With this difference in worldview, few “APIs” exist to facilitate communication

If you're interested in application communication and/or web services, I recommend taking a look. If nothing else, this is an interesting slant for a paper.

Men, Women, and Web Services ( in category Random Thoughts , WebTech ) - posted at Fri, 21 Jan, 21:26 Pacific | «e»