SOA & Business Process Integration - Overview
Service oriented and business process solutions are a type of distributed system. This type of solution is becoming more prevalent as business owners and developers seek to connect people, processes and information into effective value chains.
What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution that breaks down information silos and maximizes business agility. Service orientation modularizes IT resources, creating loosely coupled business processes that integrate information across business systems. Each IT resource, whether an application, system or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. These capabilities are available through interfaces; complexity arises when service providers differ in their operating system or communication protocols, resulting in inoperability.
What is Business Process Integration (BPI)?
Business Process Integration (BPI) is a management discipline that combines a process-centric and cross-functional approach to improving how organizations achieve their business goals. A BPI solution provides the tools that help make these processes explicit, as well as the functionality to help business managers control and change both manual and automated workflows. Managing business processes is critical for any size of organization that would benefit from greater visibility into and control over the processes that support their business goals.
The Ensynch Difference
Ensynch has exceptional experience in helping clients understand how SOA & BPI apply to their business. Our approach is focused on assessing and impacting business results and our clients know they are getting proven, consistent solutions and "Whatever IT Takes" commitment, to deliver unparalleled return on investment.
Ensynch's SOA and BPI solutions work together to address your unique business needs and improve business results through the following benefits:
- Stronger connections with customers and suppliers. By making dynamic applications and business services available to external customers and suppliers, not only is richer collaboration possible, but customer/partner satisfaction is also increased.
- Enhanced business decision making. By aggregating access to business services and information into a set of dynamic, composite business applications, decision makers gain broader visibility and more accurate and comprehensive information.
- Greater employee productivity. By providing streamlined access to systems and information and enabling business process improvement, businesses can drive greater employee productivity.
Assess
To understand more about where your organization is currently, and where you want to be, first - determine where you are according to the criteria below (Basic, Standardized, Advanced, or Dynamic), then review the challenges and benefits at each level to determine the potential impact on your business.
Basic
- Architectural plans are reactive and application centric
- Web services are not reused and basic XML is used without a services approach
- The need to integrate isolated systems and applications is not a priority
- Process is locked inside standalone applications or involves manual workarounds
- Business-to-business (B2B) activity is based on phone and fax, manual entry, or hard-coded workarounds
Standardized
- An architectural mindset and a road map for services and processes exist, but they are not enterprise-wide and are not supported by full-time staff
- Some methodology exists for services that are consumed and exposed
- Point-to-point enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions exist, but there is no enterprise-wide integration
- Repetitive tasks are automated
- Some departmental processes span multiple applications
- There is proprietary, business-to-business integration or reliance on a value-added network (VAN)
| Challenges of moving from Basic to Standardized |
| Business |
- There is little process and workflow automation outside standalone applications
- Processes require manual workarounds
- B2B activities are based on phone and fax, manual entry, or hard-coded workarounds
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| IT |
- The application-centric architecture is reactive to business needs
- Basic XML is used without a services approach
- Systems and applications are isolated, and the need to integrate them is not a priority or it is considered too expensive to implement
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| Benefits of Becoming Standardized |
- Collaboration is easier and efficiency is improved by several applications working together
- Workarounds are reduced by automating repetitive tasks that are otherwise completed manually
- Communication with customers, suppliers, and trading partners is streamlined by using standard messaging exchanges such as XML and EDI
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Advanced
- There is an established architectural discipline, full-time staff, and standardized packaged integration and process software
- A development methodology for SOA and services is in position to increase the number of services
- An enterprise architecture is present for integration, for example, enterprise service bus (ESB), EAI, and business-to-business (B2B)
- Standardized, packaged integration solutions exist
- Integrated, enterprise-wide, automated core processes and monitored processes are in place
- Business-to-business solutions exist to handle multiple standards such as XML, X12, and EDIFACT
| Challenges of moving from Standardized to Advanced |
| Business |
- A few departmental processes are still performed manually by using multiple applications
- Business-to-business integration is proprietary or reliant on vendors
- Users have limited real-time visibility into business activities and process indicators
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| IT |
- EAI solutions are mostly point-to-point
- There is some use of standard integration packaged software, but it is not enterprise wide
- There are limited architectural plans for services and processes and there is limited reuse of services; the organization lacks the required full-time architectural staff
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| Benefits of Becoming Advanced |
Business Benefits
- Automating processes across workloads and departments increases throughput of customer and employee processes; productivity also increases
- The organization can easily manage or provision new trading partners and support multiple trading standards
- Enables insight into business activities and manages those activities in real time
IT Benefits
- Developers can efficiently develop and maintain code by using standard packaged software and can avoid rewriting code whenever systems or processes change
- Automating processes across workloads and departments increases throughput of customer and employee processes; productivity also increases
- Using SOA and services provides optimal reusability and reduces development cost and time
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Dynamic
- There is full use of enterprise-wide SOA and process abstraction to provide dynamic versioning, controlled updates, redeployment, and workload adaptability
- The capability exists to aggregate services and extend their use beyond the firewall
- Fully integrated processes are in place across the enterprise
- Services-based EAI is in place and it accommodates the integration of new applications and possible standards
- Workflows are automated and they have end-to-end visibility
- B2B activities are integrated across the firewall into collaborative processes and workflows
| Challenges of moving from Advanced to Dynamic |
| Business and IT |
- Core business processes are automated and are integrated across applications and departments; some standalone processes have abstracted rules and workflow mapping
- Core business processes are automated but business activities are not yet fully monitored and the response to rules is not yet at the full extent
- The B2B solution is versatile enough to handle multiple standards and multiple trading partners, but it is not fully integrated into internal collaboration processes
- Although there is an established architectural discipline with an established methodology for SOA and services, it is not enterprise wide and pervasive
- IT assets are limited by internal scalability and hard assets
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| Benefits of Becoming Dynamic |
- By abstracting processes, IT is highly responsive to business needs and can easily integrate new applications and standards and ensure higher levels of service
- Customers can set alerts and notifications based on key performance indicators that are defined in running an automated business process
- Customers can reduce the costs of conducting business across organizational boundaries by automating B2B into their internal workflows, and can enable agile management of trading partners and changes to rules
- Loosely coupled devices, applications, services, and data based on services allows the IT department to be more agile, to quickly integrate and adapt new systems and process changes
- Customers can use SOA across internal services and external federated services, to operate in the current situation and scale IT to customer capacity as needed
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SOA & BPI Related Products
- .NET Framework
- BizTalk Server
- VisualStudio Team System
- System Center
- SharePoint
- Oslo
Request more information about SOA and Business Process Integration solutions from Ensynch.
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