BPM/SOA, Business Analytics, and Intelligence

After a truly comprehensive discussion on a variety of integration patterns and technologies in preceding chapters, it becomes exceedingly clear that the integrated CPM, BPM, SOA, and service computing approach should be used to fully leverage disparate and distributed enterprise applications, global connectivity, and underlying enterprise application integration technologies in organizations. The conducted enterprise integration in an organization, thus, can deliver a performance-driven, business-oriented, and agile IT solution for the organization to strive for competitive advantages.

Services and Service Computing

Internet technology continues to grow fast and has now become the dominant computing technology in developing software and computing applications. By fully taking advantage of the quick development of the service concept and modeling, Web services technology, as part of Internet technology, has rapidly evolved and made a drastic impact on enterprise integration. A deployed Web based service, relying on a suite of Internet based standard protocols, is self-contained, self-describing, and network-neutral computing component. It can be readily deployed, published, located, and invoked over the heterogeneous networks. This chapter starts with a brief introduction to the concepts of services and enterprise service computing. The Web service’s technical fundamentals are then fully explored. XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI as the core technologies are further explained in great detail. Implementation examples are finally used to demonstrate how the Web services technology can be typically applied in integrating distributed applications across an organization.

Business Process Management

As the business competition gets increasingly intensified, a competitive business becomes increasingly dependent upon effective and reliable computing services empowered by integrated IT systems. Effective IT systems in an organization are remarkably delineated with the same characteristics: the right data and information can be delivered to the right user at the right place on time; the underlying IT supports can be easily adapted to the ever-changing business setting so that the first characteristic can be consistently maintained; business intelligence can be incrementally developed to facilitate business operations with the support of effective decision-making at a variety of organizational levels across the organization. IT systems can be effectively integrated through implementing business process management (BPM) – a newly emerging corporate IT concept, philosophy, and technology that help align business operations and IT supports in a competitive manner. This chapter first explores the concept of aligning business processes with IT systems. Surely, computing service processes are derived from the correlated business activities within a business unit or across business units, reflecting corporate best practices. How BPM can be well defined, modeled, and managed while integrating enterprise systems is then discussed. As the best practices evolves along with the changes in business operations for a competitive advantage, approaches to building the necessary agility in support of managing the changes of IT-driven business processes is finally discussed.

Importance and Challenge of Enterprise Integration

Business environments nowadays, different from those not long ago, change very quickly. As for enterprise integration, frequently, the following reasons are found, which considerably contribute to the changes that would be necessary in conducting enterprise integration: 1) Business acquisition & merger – Two or more business organizations want to leverage each other’s products and marketing strengths to strive for a competitive advantage in business; 2) Dynamically changing market conditions - Due to the globalization and changing customer needs, products and services products must be changed. Therefore, the business operations managing the lifecycle of the products and services must be changed accordingly; 3) Technology advancement – New applications are introduced or enhancements and enrichments of support functions in the existing applications become necessary to help improve the business operations further in an organization. A fictional organization is provided in this chapter, aimed at demonstrating how a typical organization relies on information systems in support of its daily business operations and management. The main supports enabled by the deployed information systems at this organization are fully explained first. Then the importance and challenge of enterprise integration is discussed, which lays out a necessary foundation for the discussions in the remaining chapters.

Evolution of Computing and Networks Technologies

The advances in distributed computing and interconnected networks have made possible efficiently and cost-effectively linking people, isolated systems, computing resources, and information across business constituent units in an organization, resulting in substantially increasing the overall business process automation and productivity in the organization. As the world has witnessed in last several decades or so, distributed computing and interconnected networks have radically transformed the research and development, operations, and management in enterprise integration. Integrating isolated heterogeneous and complex enterprise systems becomes a trend. A solid knowledge of the evolution of computing and networks technologies helps create a solid technical foundation, which accordingly helps get a solid understanding of the necessity of applying right approaches and technologies in conducting business oriented enterprise integration in practice. A brief review of the evolution of computing and networks technology becomes necessary. In this chapter, the concept of computing is first discussed. The fundamentals of software applications are then introduced. Then, networking technologies and distributed computing are explored. Finally, the evolution of programming models applicable for enterprise integration is fully discussed.

Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered a piece of cohesive integration glue that ties all the available computing services together across an organization. In enterprise integration, SOA is essentially a set of design and implementation principles that can guide integration practitioners to design and develop interoperable support services that are derived from individual enterprise applications in an organization, facilitating smart integration across distributed applications so that all business domains in the organization can strive for a common business goal in a competitive way. This chapter first discusses SOA fundamentals, covering all the design principles and underlying supporting technologies. As organizations would have different business priorities in integrating their distributed applications, different practical integration entry points to SOA design and implementations are then articulated. Finally, Malvern iStore’s SOA attempts to meet the dynamics business needs are an illustrative example presented in this chapter.

Integrating Existing Applications

Enterprise applications are usually designed, developed, and deployed for well predefined business domains. In other words, domain-based applications mainly meet the needs of their focused business domains. Frequently, they complement each other by playing support roles during normal business operations. It is well recognized that organizations can maximally capitalize on their investments by fully leveraging all the available IT supports enabled by individual applications through enterprise integration. However, integrating distributed applications across an organization is challenging as these distributed applications are quite often found disparate and heterogeneous in many aspects. Regardless of how distributed applications were built and how they are disparate and heterogeneous, there are essentially four main categories of integration approaches used to address the integration needs in an organization. These categories are classified based on the hierarchical levels at which the integration takes place. The four level-based categories are data-, method-, API-, and process-levels. Accordingly, four integration methodologies are defined. This chapter mainly focuses on the explorations of the technical fundamentals of data-, method-, API-, and process-level integrations. An interface is the interaction channel provided by an application, which delivers a designated computing service for invocation. The accessibility of the interface to a computing service at any integration level in the hierarchy of a given application depends on the privilege enabled for the end users who requires the services. Different examples are used to demonstrate how data-, method-, and API-level integrations can be effectively applied in integrating distributed applications across an organization. An introduction to the process-level integration is presented in this chapter.

Connectivity and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Although the concept of connectivity in different contexts might have different meanings, its central functionality remains the same, facilitating connections to meet the needs of concerned contexts. From the enterprise integration perspective, connectivity should significantly resolve the heterogeneity issues in light of enhancing the needed interactions among applications. Hence, efficient and cost-effective cross-application and real-time data/functionality sharing can result. As discussed in the earlier chapters, the middleware technology has significantly evolved, providing the increasing needed support for the connectivity necessary for integrating distributed applications. With the evolution of enterprise integration architecture, patterns, and technologies, the middleware role evolves too. Middleware not only serves as a facilitator to provide passive universal connectivity across distributed applications, but also takes an active role in promoting and supporting the practice of service-orientation principles in enterprise integration. Indeed, enterprise service bus (ESB) emerges as this kind of middleware and integration platform. In this chapter, different perspectives of connectivity applied in enterprises are first discussed. The insights of the emerging concept, model, and technology employed in ESBs are then explored. As ESBs become as a pillar in enterprise integration, the roles and capabilities of ESBs in great detail are finally analyzed.

Managing Distributed Objects and Services

To overcome the discovered shortcomings in a procedure-based programming language, object-oriented design (OOD) and object-oriented programming (OOP) emerged in the late 1980s and then became popular in 1990s. OOD/OOP has been widely applied in practice since the early years of 21st century. In this chapter, the need for distributed objects and messaging in enterprise applications is first discussed. As more and more distributed applications have been developed using OOP languages, integration practitioners have to understand how distributed objects and messaging based applications can be efficiently and cost-effectively designed and managed to meet the needs of enterprise integration in the long run. Moreover, there are many different programming languages that can be used to program object-oriented applications. Managing distributed objects in a heterogeneous computing setting is then fully explored. Finally, the middleware technology in support of effective management of distributed objects and services is articulated. Examples of leveraging middleware to manage distributed applications are provided.

Enterprise Integration Technical Foundation

In an organization, its business changes in a variety of ways over time, and so do its underlying supportive IT systems. For example, the changes required at Malvern iStore were clearly shown in last chapter; one positive change that would make a significant impact on the growth of business at Malvern iStore is to conduct effective enterprise integration. Note that the underlying distributed applications and the corresponding business and operational needs vary from organization to organization, and there is surely no one-size-fits-all solution to integrating distributed applications to meet a variety of needs across organizations. As discussed in last chapter, a solution might be technically optimal, but it might not be viable financially or due to other restrictions like human capitals and time constraints. However, for organizations, no matter which approach and technology will be applied in conducting enterprise integration, in a small or large scale fashion, the ultimate goal should be the same – improving the business’s competitiveness. This chapter starts with the discussion of the foundation of enterprise integration, focusing on the basic integration mechanisms, patterns, and technologies that have been applied in integrating distributed applications over the years. Different methods of sharing data and functionality between applications will be first introduced. Certain explorations on the differences between sharing data and functionality will be presented. As socket communications, remote procedure calls, and remote invocation methods are the foundation of the middleware technology and state-of-the-art service computing, numerous relevant examples are provided.