Once a rural area dotted with farms, Fairfax County, Virginia, in the twenty-first century is a growing metropolis that hosts a thriving technology industry. Located in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., Fairfax County is home to many high-tech and government workers. The area also provides a variety of attractions, including over 300 parks, an impressive collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landmarks, and Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts, the only national park dedicated to the performing arts.

Fairfax County also has one of the largest concentrations of retail shopping on the East Coast. Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria contain stores such as Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, and Nordstrom, as well as hundreds of upscale boutiques, specialty shops, and restaurants.

Meeting the governmental needs of Fairfax County's residents and businesses requires a substantial IT effort. Leading the infrastructure is Ray J. Herold, Fairfax County's director of technology architecture. Herold believes that Web services can be the key to making government more efficient and responsive to the needs of both people and business. Fairfax County has long been a leader in applying emerging technologies to governmental needs; it was one of the first government bodies in the world with its own Web site. Herold is currently working to bring Web services to any part of the county government's IT infrastructure that can benefit from the technology.

We take pride in the fact that, even though we are a government entity, people perceive us as being forward-looking and a leader in the use of technology. We feel very strongly that technology offers us a way to provide more services to our citizens, hopefully at a reduced cost, and to provide services in a way that's more convenient.

We have always tried to get our finger on the pulse of the industry, to see where things are going so that we can position ourselves not to the bleeding edge, but close to the edge. Close enough so that, when something looks really promising, we can be in a position to take advantage of the benefits that a particular technology might offer.

Web services first appeared on Herold's radar scope in the form of XML.

We initially started looking at XML about two years ago and said, "Boy, this is really going to be a significant way for us to exchange information and not to have to worry about formats on the other end, the particular databases, and all of that.

We started out looking at XML and kind of wound up looking at the SOAP, too. Extensible Markup Language is how you define the information, but Web services and SOAP provide the mechanism for actually delivering that information.

Herold appreciates the way Web services automate routine processes.

Whether you're a government, or any kind of business, so much of what you do is really the same thing. Every time you build an application, you wind up reinventing that wheel each time. How many ways are there to post money to your accounting system? How many ways are there to register somebody for a particular service, or event?

Prior to Web services, we were stuck in the situation of always having to reinvent the wheel. Web services changed that. We now have a way we can easily communicate with other levels of government. We can now make information available without bending over backwards, or changing our platforms or code. We now simply expose each particular business function as a Web service, register it in a Web Services Registry/Repository, and get access to these other jurisdictions, or even the public. We've extended our reach and our ability to provide information, without really having to do a whole lot of additional work on the functional side. As a result, we've seen a lot of benefits, both internally and externally.

Herold notes that something as simple, yet time-consuming, as address maintenance can greatly benefit from Web services.

You can get databases from the postal service and several other places, but you've got to update them every so often. New addresses arise and zip codes change, so the database has to be upgraded on a regular basis, and that turns into an ongoing maintenance chore. If the postal service made zip code searches available as a Web service, then instead of getting a database and coding the database into your application, you could simply write a line of code that accesses the appropriate Web services. You wouldn't have to worry about updates and so forth, because you would be going directly to the source.

On a more serious level, Herold is currently planning a system that would use Web services to coordinate the processing of jail inmates.

If we arrest somebody here, say for drunk driving or whatever, we want to make sure that person doesn't have a warrant someplace else. Or, if the person is currently in jail and we're getting ready to release him, we want to make sure he's not wanted anywhere else. Right now, there's really no single, easy way to do that. With the surrounding jurisdictions, we actually make telephone calls. It's not technologically sexy, and it's easy to miss something.

Web services would allow the various jurisdictions to coordinate their criminal justice activities with a minimum of human input, says Herold.

Each jurisdiction has a list of people who are wanted—whether it's at the local, state, or even federal level. If we could all agree on a common schema for that information, through XML, then all of the jurisdictions could share data through a Web service. For example, if you had a person you were ready to release from jail, and his name, Social Security number, or other identifier comes up on the system, you could tell the jail: "Hold on, this person has a warrant." It would all be automatic and done in background through the exposure of functions that already exist for each jurisdiction.

Herold believes that Web services are destined to play an increasingly important role in government IT infrastructures.

Probably 80 percent of the interaction that people have with government, at least as far as services go, is at the local level—police, fire department, human services, library, and so forth. But a lot of the programs are either funded, or in some way administered, at the state or federal level. Currently, there's no real way to pull all that information together for somebody who's trying to find out about a particular program, such as Section 8 housing. If you go to the county site, you get the county's perspective. If you go to the state site, you get its perspective. With Web services, we now have the ability to totally strip away those boundaries. For the citizen who's simply trying to get help, we can get information from all these layers, behind the scenes, then aggregate it and present it as a coherent block. Internally, Web services can offer a lot of benefits. Externally, however, we feel like the sky's the limit.

Fairfax County provides Web services externally through Recreation One-Stop. The initiative, managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, is in the process of creating two products: the Recreation.gov (www.recreation.gov) Web site and the RecML data standard.

The Web site is designed to offer people single-point access to information about recreational opportunities nationwide. The service provides comprehensive information on approximately 2,500 public recreation sites. There are also plans to add thousands of additional facilities managed by state, tribal, and local governments. Additionally, Recreation.gov links to state tourism sites, providing information about thousands of private attractions and facilities.

Through Recreation.gov, people planning a trip will be able to:

Discover which parks, forests, lakes, museums, and other recreation sites are located near a particular area.

Sort through thousands of different recreation sites to find which ones offer specific recreational activities, such as hunting and camping.

Find the location of recreation sites on maps, and obtain driving directions.

Make reservations, order passes, and conduct other service transactions online.

Link to related information and services provided by nongovernmental partners.

Thanks to the Internet and Web services, organizations can easily exchange data. But, in order to reduce potential confusion, it's also essential to be able to define specific language exchanged by partners. RecML will establish definitions for various recreation-related terms. RecML is being designed as a voluntary data standard that will be adopted by consensus within the recreation community to streamline the sharing of recreation-related data.

The RecML standard will define more terms than are displayed on the current Recreation.gov Web site. For example, Recreation.gov lists "fishing" as an activity, but a quick glance at the various state tourism sites will show that states advertise trout fishing, bass fishing, deep-sea fishing, and so on. The additional subcategories of fishing will be developed over the next few years, after a consensus is established among potential users.

The RecML standard will eventually be adopted officially by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The first version of RecML was scheduled to be drafted by September 30, 2003. Other versions will be developed in stages.

Fairfax County's participation in Recreation One-Stop goes back to a previous intragovernment Web services project called Government Without Boundaries (GWoB), a government-sponsored initiative that was eventually absorbed into Recreation One-Stop.

Lynn Hadden, Fairfax County's information architect, says that using Web services to feed data into Recreation.gov will make it easier for travel-related organizations to provide key information about Fairfax County activities to their users.

Recreation.gov is the virtual repository, and Web services make the information available to others. Private, travel-related organizations, such as tour operators and travel agents, might want the same information on their Web site. They could have that information available for people who are traveling. That's the importance of using Web services.

Getting initiatives like Recreation One-Stop and GWoB off the ground required extensive cooperation among information providers, says Hadden.

We had a large group dealing with the issue of managing intergovernmental collaboration. It was also a relatively diverse group. We had the State of New Jersey, the Commonwealth of Virginia, the General Services Administration (GSA), and many others.

We all went through a lengthy process. We had to meet with the application people from each entity, decide exactly what data we needed to exchange, and what we were going to call that data in the schema. Then I came back here and mapped the schema to our SQL database. The Commonwealth of Virginia did the same thing, using the shared terminology that arose out of the schema. So, when we delivered the data, Recreation.gov knew the meaning of the data.

All of that hard work paid off by making it easier for Fairfax County to provide data to external organizations.

Different groups request our data. In the past, formulating the data requested by a specific entity, and then populating their Web site, took quite some time to do. Now, by using Web services, a group can make a request whenever they want to, and get the exact data they need in the format that's required. There's no interaction between us—we just publish the Web service, and they go and use it. In other words, by generating the Web service, we can now point to it and say, "Our data is there, go get it." Before, people would want us to take our data, enter it into their systems, and update it in six different ways. That's not possible on a practical basis.

While technical coordination is important, business integration is a fundamental concern, says Hadden.

The technology is not the problem—that's easy. The biggest obstacle to overcome is the business integration. That means getting people to understand why you're doing it and what you need to do to exchange the information. There has to be a real purpose for people to participate in these integrated activities, otherwise you can't sustain it.

Herold notes that as Fairfax County continues its commitment to Web services, his shop is focusing on Microsoft technology.

We made the decision to do development on the .NET framework and the Microsoft series of components—Visual Studio .NET, .NET Server (now Windows Server), and ASP .NET. We think it provides a good platform for Web services-oriented applications.

The choice we had to make was between .NET and J2EE. They both have their pluses and minuses—it really isn't a case where we think one is better than the other. We are already using Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers, MS Exchange, MS Windows desktop products, and IIS Web server. Our Web-based development is based on ASP, so .NET just became an extension of that. We already have a lot of experience with Microsoft platforms. We have people who know Visual Basic and ASP. We don't have too many people who know Java, so it really became a path of least resistance for us. Even so, we can see an environment in the future where we will have to support both platforms, and utilize the benefits they both provide as the opportunities present themselves.

Herold believes that the .NET platform provides enough Web services tools to provide a complete environment.

Microsoft .NET provides us with the kinds of things we're looking for (with the inclusion of SOAP and other necessary facilities) to provide a robust development platform. There is also a growing suite of third-party tools, which provide additional functionality and add-ons to the .NET environment.

Fairfax County is also using webMethods software to bring its legacy systems into the Web services loop.

The webMethods software is an EAI—enterprise application integration product. It's also focused around XML and Web services.

We're rewriting the Sheriff's system and, hopefully, that will be implemented in a couple of years. But a lot of our legacy systems are going to be around for a long while—seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—maybe even twelve years. On older mainframe platforms, on older databases, and things like that, it's just not realistic for us to say, "We're going to go out and rewrite all these systems." That's because they're massive systems, and the resources just aren't there for us to do that.

An EAI product (such as webMethods) gives us a way to access our old legacy systems, either at the database level, or at the transaction level. The software provides the information from different sources that must be aggregated, and then it either passes the data between the applications, or passes it on to users on an aggregate screen.

Herold likes the way webMethods gives Web services functionality to legacy systems with a minimum of tinkering.

The great thing about webMethods is you don't really have to change your existing applications, since it's expensive to change code. What you can do, however, is change the application's functionality. You can integrate functionality, or parts of functionality, from different applications or different databases. You can actually end up with a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts.

You can add more functionality to an application before it gets to the user through something like ASP. You actually have the ability not only to integrate your functionality, but to enhance it. With EAI products, such as webMethods, you can do that in a way that doesn't require you to go in and change your existing code. That's because webMethods has all of these different, built-in adapters.

Herold says he doesn't feel uneasy being an early Web services adopter. He believes that taking advantage of powerful new technologies is something of a duty.

I feel very strongly that the nature of the IT profession has changed. You should always keep your eye out on what's over the horizon. That doesn't mean jumping over the cliff, but one also shouldn't get too comfortable in a particular niche. You'll get left behind and lose the opportunities that new technologies can provide. I think that's one of the reasons I'm in a management position. I've always been someone who feels strongly that you need to be conscious to what's coming along and to keep alert for things you might want to use in a particular environment. Yet, there's always risk in change, and you want to try to mitigate that risk.

Herold says he's proud to be associated with a forward looking organization.

The county has a reputation for being a leader in IT. We were among the first with a Web site. I'm personally very proud of that. We're probably ahead of most groups on the architecture level. We've worked, for example, with NASCIO—the National Association of State CIOs—in developing a flexible architectural framework that a lot of jurisdictions are just now starting to adopt.

It's important to lead an organization into well-researched risks, says Herold.

Even if we wanted to be more conservative, we can't be. With all the high-tech companies in this area, people know what to expect from technology. They certainly talk to our elected officials and our county executive. Those people are aware of all kinds of things, and they're bound to ask us why we aren't doing certain things. We feel our trick is to stay one step ahead of them, or at least be ready to answer that question when they ask it.

Herold says IT managers shouldn't fear emerging technologies, such as Web services.

You will, on occasion, misread the tea leaves. But I think there are some technologies that become so obvious that it almost becomes a no-brainer. Web services and XML fit into that category. I feel tremendously confident about this. It really is incumbent upon us to be positioned to utilize the benefits of new technologies for the benefit of the county's citizens. It's a way we can provide better services and more information.

Whenever you're out front, there's always a little bit of concern. It's a calculation you do based on your experience, knowledge, and reading of where the industry is going. We talk to a lot of people, and we go to conferences. We're a client of Gartner [the Stamford, Connecticut-based technology research company], and we certainly get their advice before we take a plunge. In the case of Web services, I'm 100 percent convinced of their value. I would bet a year's salary. This is where it's all going.

Web services are just beginning to hit their stride, says Herold.

I think there's still a bit of tweaking that needs to be done. But I also think that if you wait until the tweaking is done, you'll totally miss the boat.

Herold says he's looking forward to using additional Web services tools.

I'm still sort of like a kid in a candy store, taking it all in, and thinking about all the stuff we can do. I would like to see a little more work done on the registries and repositories. That's how you make your services available to others, you put them in a registry/repository.

It's roughly equivalent to a search engine, like Google, which is used to look for static information on the Web. It's sort of like that. You go to a registry/ repository to find out what actual services, from a functional point of view, are available. You go through those and you think, "Oh, this is a good one. I want to use this in my application."

The different industry sectors are working on XML vocabularies and registry/repositories. I know the chemical sector is working on one for their particular business area, the banks are working on one, insurance, manufacturing, and so on. A lot of the business sectors are working on this, but I'd like to see more work done on the government side. And I'd like to see more work on a higher level, not just the industry sectors doing it individually, but doing it on more of a universal kind of registry. To me, the one area where we're really not up to snuff yet is in the whole directory services area.

Herold offers prospective Web services adopters two bits of advice.

The first word of wisdom is: Do look into it. The second is: Even if you're not willing to jump into it just yet, at least start doing things now to position yourself to be there, because this will happen, this is where [IT] is going.

I've been doing [IT] for a long time, and there's only been a few things in my career where I've felt this confident about things. I've seen some really good technologies come and go. This is one of a small handful of those that I feel completely confident in. It's a relatively simple technology, but the benefits are humongous.