A Holistic Approach To Business Process Integration, Where Strategy & Architecture Dictates

To stay competitive, companies must be agile in adapting their business processes to the ever-changing market dynamics. The adaptive business process based enterprises should look beyond the traditional enterprises and marketplaces through collaborative interactions and dynamic e-business solution bindings. The enterprise infrastructure has to provide the capability for dynamic discovery of trading partners and service providers as well as enabling federated security mechanisms, solution monitoring and management.

The need to project focus on the emerging business process modeling has to be realized, simulation, integration and management using emerging technologies. With cluster of collaborative business, demanding trading partners to share proprietary data, creates a need to have a system that would integrate applications within and beyond firewalls and would facilitate seamless integration between applications. In a distributed and decentralized process oriented environment, enterprises function within the boundaries as independent business units, but function by itself and serve as separate service domains. Several service domains interact to share proprietary data. These reside in separate operating systems as well. Architecture becomes a key point in solving such an IT environment, where composite applications send and receive data which are proprietary and most importantly requires adaptability to new services.

WebServices

Today’s accelerated time-to-market and focus on costs require rapid implementation of new solutions while leveraging existing IT investments. The statistical numbers of integration related work is exploding—but integration doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly complex. The Integration architecture that unifies the speed and cost-effectiveness of Web Services with various data formats and traditional ways of integrating has to be understood, thus fueling the process of aligning business to IT. Gartner had indicated that only a few will be successful in transformation of legacy systems into new business dynamics in the integration space. Engineers who know new technologies like J2EE, Java or .NET may not be able to understand COBOL systems. The existence of XML and parsing of such documents are evading the requirement for understanding of legacy code. Thus webservices plays a vital role in the overall integration activities across the enterprise.

Challenges in Data conversion

With evolvement of webservices, a standardized way of sharing of data exist, but gives way to a lot of other areas that require a thorough understanding, such as XML parsing issues, XML Security, performance and compliance with policies. With these pass-thru's, the system will now considerably slide down in performance graphs. Overhead in processing time will become a key challenge. Secondly, deployments will demand several other layers to appear raising heavy performance alarms to IT managers who support high availability systems. Through methodologies which revolves around Straight Through Processing harness systems, accelerators and advanced process integration tools and strategies, A reference model for integration between business processes, which would then leverage webservices and visual tools for enabling a process integration framework could be built. This would then, complement a Service Oriented Architecture environment.

The Approach

Enablement of an SOA requires strategic phased approach in planning, identifying projects, defining a path to success and final deployment plans. This requires a great understanding of business domains and all about heterogeneous systems within an enterprise. Not just that, but have in possession, a wealth of visual tools and software. For this, a union of technology partners need to exist. Compliance with IT governance and regulatories for the organizations needs evaluation for these products. Thus, an end to end solution for an SOA is weaved. This addresses key challenges in implementation.

The Eco System and foresight.

Webservices will evolve and start clustering. To develop, test and deploy, thus managing the integration modulars, will need a system that would eventually do business process management. This will require document choreography and webservices orchestration for least. Best practices and design principles need to be applied while in the evolvement process. Thus, systems that would react to events will rise. Because of this need, applicaton containers have extended itself to hold integration modulars, like business process integrators, business clients and message bus. Need for application request dispatchers, sensitive to document based systems will arise. Routing of information will use one too many methods and therefore will be unpredictable, unknown at originating points. A total distributed request switching stations will overcome the peer to peer method of delivery and will defeat hub based centralized systems.

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