|
Implementing the SOA
(Malaysian Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) THE direction of the enteprise software integration market is changing. Organisational expectations for IT have shifted from cost savings and business automation to creating an agile enterprise that can adapt to changing business dynamics, compliance rules and outsourcing.
This has given rise to the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) ideal, an agile IT architecture which can adapt and respond to changing business dynamics quickly and nimbly, resulting in sticky customers, cost- effectiveness and increased return on investment.
Now, organisations see IT as providing a competitive business advantage - but only when maximum agility is achieved; otherwise IT is yet another growth bottleneck. Using SOA implementations that go well beyond what people typically think of as `Web services,' organisations are now fusing their business processes to build an agile enterprise by creating composite applications on Web services, often delivering these through enterprise portals.
On the surface, traditional integration solutions (e.g. those in the market for the past 10 years) appear to meet all the functional requirements to build these composite applications. But these solutions introduce `silos' due to their proprietary nature and minimal interoperability. They can't truly deliver on the promise of IT agility and SOA. This is because you can't achieve IT agility if you need to expend significant effort to integrate your own integration technologies and can't easily hire qualified developers?
The new wave of integration products avoid the problems of their predecessors by leveraging on several key standards that have rapidly matured and gained remarkable industry consensus over the past several years.
AGILE ENTERPRISE REQUIREMENTS
Building an agile enterprise requires adopting an industry standard SOA approach to iron out processes, data models, and system interfaces. Key requirements include:
* aligning IT with business goals: Developers and analysts must work with tools that match their requirements and skills, yet share common views and metamodels. Tools must provide for efficient implementation of processes while recognising that different parties may want representations at different levels of detail and complexity.
* adopting a modern Business Process Management (BPM) approach: Effective, repeatable processes are at the core of any successful company. Your developers must be able to reliably and rapidly implement the processes analysts define.
* defining adaptive processes: Systems and processes must be able to respond to changing needs without recompilation or deployment. Detailed policies and rules must be abstracted from fixed functional and operational capabilities. For example, use Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to analyse ever-increasing volumes of data. Aggregate, analyse, and present real-time and historic data to monitor processes and respond more rapidly to critical events through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), alerts, and notifications.
* leveraging integration standards: Easy integration with back-end applications is needed, irrespective of the protocols, interfaces, and data models supported by those systems. Standards such as Web Services, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Java Connector Architecture (JCA) let organisations own their processes in a vendor-independent fashion that was previously impossible.
FLEXIBLE ROBUSTNESS
A core requirement of an agile enterprise is also the ability to adapt its processes to respond to changing conditions without requiring recompilation or redeployment. This especially applies to applications whose business rules are subject to frequent change. Implementing processes with externalised rules for these applications is one of the most effective ways to make composite applications as flexible as possible.
In this way, business rules can also be changed and help ensure policies are implemented correctly and consistently without requiring IT involvement for simple changes in rules or policies.
A robust rules engine is a critical part of an SOA platform. Requiring organisations to take an all-or-nothing approach to adopting an SOA platform can actually prevent business agility - for example, during a merger or acquisition. That is why you should always be able to integrate your SOA platform with leading commercial rules engines.
So don't get caught out in being penny wise but pound foolish. Granted, previous generation integration solutions have been functionally complete, but they are also unnecessarily complex, proprietary and expensive to enable IT agility.
A look around at what the indutry is pushing tells us that the open standards and technologies to help IT meet the requirements of the business have begun to mature and move into the mainstream. Thus, the key requirements for an agile IT organisation should be met with a thoroughly modern approach to integration.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
INDUSTRIES
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.
