xml.com has just published an article discussing the economics of Web services, in this particular case in the healthcare industry, with specific relation to the HIPPA requirements (privacy requirements instituted by the Clinton Administration in its closing years).

From the article:

This article will discuss the economics and management of creating and later aggregating a new web service, from the perspective of people with different roles who contribute to the final outcome. ... I've chosen the healthcare industry in general and hospitals in particular to provide a laboratory for studying the economics and management of software development (and deployment). Whatever your industry, you'll find some or all of the problems you face in the following sections. Hospitals often have many departments that are not managed centrally, with each department providing a unique solution, and few of them connected together.

For the full article, see xml.com.

On a bit of a different tack, there are also some really cool web services applications in Bioinformatics. The reason being that many implementations of algorithms and data are distributed globally across different corporations and universities. As a crude example, I might have a DNA sequence that I wish to perform some matching with against all sequences in a databank. The web service would invoke a matching algorithm (BLAST is a popular one) and return the sequences that matched mine.

I know that EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) has actually been offering web service interfaces for quite some time. One example of a vendor who is offering such services is Lion Bioscience. Their successful SRS product was used in the mapping of the human genome and now supports seamless integration via web services. See http://www.lionbioscience.com/solutions/e20472/e20475/index_eng.html

BxA company internal knowledgeexpress portal use web services technology to query the customer information from external information.