MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS, WEB SERVICES ARE FROM BETELGEUSE

“The only way we will really know the condition of Betelgeuse is to wait a few million years.” Having trouble making robust legacy applications talk to hot 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 Problem Despite sharing a species (homo sapiens), according to Deborah Tannen, men and women could not be more different when it comes to communication and how they view their place in the world. 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. And importantly, independence is critical. “Women are also concerned with achieving status and avoiding failure, but these are not the goals they are focused on all the time, and they tend to pursue them in the guise of connection, ” notes Deborah Tannen. (Fig

Island Times, Mar 2010

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Casco Bay Weekly : 21 August 2003

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Island Times, Jan-Feb 2010

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