Early on in our journey to a service-oriented enterprise we began to realize that for services to work, truly work, they had to be standards based, and, more important, those standards had to trump implementation, so that the services would interoperate as well.

In our training class, English was the language standard for speaking as well as writing. This made sense, as English seemed to be the one language that the class all had in common. The question was posed, for example, since the training was in France, why not have a French version of the class. This seemed a reasonable question to me as well. The answer was that while we were in France, there were many participants who did not speak French. Also, given the international nature of the audience, the question could be posed for many other languages as well. For the purposes of cost containment and the ability to be flexible regarding the content (by only having to update content in one language, not a dozen), a single standard was needed.