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SOA/WEB SERVICES FEATURE ARTICLES


June 09, 2006

Interactive Communications Meets Business Process Orchestration

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


When talking about telecom (pun intended), we often focus solely on the interpersonal aspect of the communication; the transmission and reception of audio and video between two or more people. Most of the vendors in this industry are guilty of it. Desktop telephone service, desktop video service, branch office users and so on.
 
What’s interesting to me is that interactive communication is a tool used to implement business processes. That is, without talking to each other, not much business can be processed.
 
Yet, when the software industry discusses the topic of “business process orchestration,” there is always a data-centric view of automation. You know how it goes: if you can use a technology like BPEL to “script” the business process, then the services in the service-oriented architecture will have a rallying point for coordination; they will self-orchestrate.
 
The vision we have at BlueNote is that, by creating reusable business assets specifically built to enable interactive communication, voice and video and IM and chat and whatever can be leveraged by enterprise applications in the exact same manner that other services can be used in a service oriented architecture (SOA).
 
So when Rich (BlueNote’s software architect), came into my office today and started talking about business process orchestration, I immediately started rubbing my chin, gazing upward, and day-dreaming about how great it would be to weave interactive services into the fabric that makes up a composite application. The capabilities which come from enabling business processes with embedded interactive communication are very powerful and add another dimension to our productivity. 
 
But boy was I wrong. That is not what he had in mind at all.
 
Rich is starting to turn the concept of “you interacting with me” or “the sales representative talking to the purchasing agent” on its head. It’s not just about you and I using the application and then communicating as part of the business process, but rather it’s about the applications that implement the business process being able to communicate with us as well.
 
“Stop thinking about using the application to do a job, but start thinking about the application as being your partner in the business process,” Rich says. I asked him if we should rename our product HAL/9000 and print a big red lens on our product’s CD label. 
 
All science fiction aside, he has a point. I am not sure I’m committing the opening of the pod bay doors to a single application, but there is no reason why in the process of orchestration the application cannot reach out and touch someone. To be more specific, why can’t the telephone calls that we make or receive contain information embedded in them that specifies the business process they represent?
 
Since this is not possible for traditional PBX systems (yet another nail in their coffin), or the PSTN, the business process machinery in the enterprise SOA needs a mechanism to bind process execution information with the interactive communication session. This mechanism would transmit data to and from applications and systems based on the actions taken during our normal conversations.
 
That is, if I transfer a call to a colleague, that call should transfer not just all the pertinent information along with it, but also the process that the representitive should follow when caring for this call.
 
In the Golden Age of Call Centers, the mechanism called the “screen pop” allowed the call center software to “pop” information about the caller on to the screen of the representative. This database-query-based-on-caller-information worked sometimes. The biggest drawback was that all the representatives handling the call all needed to share a common database.
 
The more elusive problem that it created is that the representative needed to deduce what process to follow to handle the caller. While it might seem obvious – they called the company’s 1-800 number, so treat them like a customer of the company – there are many situations where having the application act as a partner in this process would make for a more efficient system that yields better customer service.
 
Specifically, if you could bind business process specifications to the call, the system can go a long way to helping the Call Center representative understand the needs and handling of a caller.
 
And that’s what Rich’s point is.
 
The ability to bind dynamic information to the phone call and have that information traverse the business process in tandem with the call is paramount. Removing the limitation of the representatives’ applications sharing a common data store by transmitting the information, goes a long way to solving some of the complexities in converged applications.
 
Also, enabling the call to bind to any information, including process definition information, enables the application programmer to build event-based workflows that use telecommunications events as drivers. The call can effectively tell you how it wants to be handled.
 
Using tools such as these, the application becomes a partner in your telecommunications system. Application development does not need to be a slave to closed and expensive PBX interworking solutions. It’s not just about you and I using the application and then communicating as part of the business process, but rather it’s about the events that occur while using the telecommunication complex driving the applications and processes while orchestrating all of these moving parts.
 
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Brian Silver is chief technology officer with BlueNote Networks, which is driving the integration of SIP-based interactive communications with service-oriented architectures (SOA) by delivering the first enterprise-class interactive communication platform: SessionSuite. He can be reached at [email protected]
 

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