Chapter Three. Business Process Integration-Oriented Application Integration

Pay close attention to this chapter. This is the future of application integration. As the technology moves forward, we will not control the integration of applications through the exchange of information or the binding of processes, but through the modeling and execution of a business process model that binds processes and information within many systems, intra- or intercompany.

This is a key concept for the future of the technology and also controls how we deal with information movement and the invocation of local and remote application services. They all roll up into a BPIOAI model that controls the application integration domain, inside and outside the company.

Also, take careful note of BPI-centric standards such as RosettaNet and ebXML. We'll cover those topics later in this book.

From Chapter 2, we now know that IOAI is the science of exchanging information between many applications so that they benefit one another within an enterprise or trading community. IOAI is more traditional and occurs at the data level by simply exchanging information between systems, inter- or intracompany. Typically, this means defining information flows at the physical level, not taking into account abstract business concepts such as business processes (inter- or intracompany) that are becoming critical for application integration. Incorporating business concepts into information flow definitions is the purpose of this chapter.

Until now, what was missing from the application integration mix was the notion of Business Process Integration-Oriented Application Integration (BPIOAI). BPIOAI is the ability to define a common business process model that addresses the sequence, hierarchy, events, execution logic, and information movement between systems residing in the same organization (application integration) and systems residing in multiple organizations (B2B). Indeed, the idea of BPIOAI is to provide a single logical model that spans many applications and data stores, providing the notion of a common business process that controls how systems and humans interact to fulfill a unique business requirement.

Please note that this is a complimentary form of application integration to both IOAPI and Service-Oriented Application Integration (SOAI) (even Portal-Oriented Application Integration in some instances). BPIOAI provides a control mechanism of sorts that defines and executes the movement of information and the invocation of processes that span many systems. The goal is to abstract both the encapsulated application services and application information into a single controlling business process model (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. BPIOAI introduces the notion of a common business process model that controls the movement of information and the invocation of application services across many different systems, both inter- and intracompany.

graphics/03fig01.gif

BPIOAI may be applied to any number of business events including:

  • Processing a customer request.

  • Manufacturing an automobile.

  • Delivering a product to a customer.

  • Processing a financial transaction.

The notion is simple. Place a layer of control logic on top of the integration technology that allows the control logic to bind the systems into a single unified multistep business process that can carry out the unique functions of the business process. It must do so in the correct order, with the proper information, control sequences, state maintenance, durability, and the ability to handle exceptions.

BPIOAI is a strategy as much as a technology. It strengthens your organization's ability to interact with any number of systems inside or outside the organization by integrating entire business processes both within and between enterprises. Indeed, BPIOAI delivers application integration by dealing with several organizations and internal systems, using various metadata, platforms, and processes. BPIOAI even deals with people and other non-IT-related entities that may participate in a process. Thus, BPIOAI technology must be flexible, providing a translation layer between the source and target systems and the process integration engine. Moreover, BPIOAI technology needs to work with several types of technologies and interface patterns.

BPIOAI Technology: A Deeper Dive

BPIOAI technology is typically made up of a:

  • Graphic modeling tool, where the business model is created and behavior defined.

  • Business process engine that controls the execution of the multistep business process and maintains state and the interactions with the middleware, which in turn, interacts with any number of source or target systems.

  • Business process monitoring interface that allows end users to monitor and control the execution of a business process in real time and optimize where needed.

  • Business process engine interface that allows other applications to access the business process engine.

  • Integration technology or application integration middleware (such as an integration server or application server) that connects the source and target systems to the BPIOIA technology (see Figure 3.2).

    Figure 3.2. The components of a typical business process integration solution.

    graphics/03fig02.jpg



Next Generation Application Integration(c) From Simple Information to Web Services
Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services
ISBN: 0201844567
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 220

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