A Focus on User-Driven Business

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Because BizTalk is designed to maintain business relationships, your BizTalk server and its operation should be owned by business users, not IT staff. That means that every aspect of creating business relationships and document mapping should be accessible by business users, even though those users might not be programmers.

I'm not saying that your IT staff won't be involved in the installation and maintenance of a BizTalk system. Many integration aspects are necessary when implementing a BizTalk server or any piece of code that touches legacy applications. Your IT staff will certainly be involved in building the interfaces, or "tentacles," that integrate with legacy systems.

However, you don't want to have to contact the IT staff whenever you want to create a business relationship with a new customer. Business-process owners should be able to establish and maintain relationships, do outbound and inbound document transformations, make changes to data structures (as long as the changes don't affect the operation of existing systems), and generate reports regarding the status of the system and the health of business relationships.

Such a system must also be accessible to remote users in a secure way. You'll need to implement middle-tier technologies—along with request-time encryption—to make your system usable in this way.