This booming technology allows data sources to be directly accessible through a web site and XML. If you look carefully at your project and decide that there are really several different data stores involved it is probably beneficial to migrate these to XML Web Services so that each can be dealt with as a smaller, more easily managable, sub-project.

A classic example for Web Services is a warehouse inventory service that provides information and features for other applications in the organisation. Intranet sites, client applications and services within the organisation all talk to the same web service when they want to check availability, delivery status or current cost of any product. By keeping the features focussed and oriented around just the data the Web Service is expandable, saves re-development time on other projects and maintains the integrity of the organisations data.