As a programmer, I sometimes am at a loss of words trying to articulate the concept of this "thingy" on the Internets that accepts some junk and does something with the junk and the junk flows through different thingies until it hits the end and ...
Just to be clear, my above line was used to accentuate how difficult it is to describe a web service to a business person. Recently, I was reading up on WCF on the microsoft site and came across a very helpful paragraph that describes the difference between service and data contracts.