Don't Rip and Replace, Integrate!
Mahesh H. Dodani, IBM
Software Group, U.S.A.
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1 E-BUSINESS INTEGRATION
Since the inception of OO approaches to developing applications, the
focus has been on applying these techniques to build applications that
replace older and more inflexible applications – essentially,
the rip and replace approach. However, over the same time period, technology
has accelerated the pace of change and enabled new ways of doing business.
Companies are being forced to understand and prepare for these changes
to gain the advantage over competitors and lead their industries. IBM
has defined the next wave of change as the e-business on demand era
(http://www-3.ibm.com/e-business/index_fl.html.)
An on demand business is an enterprise whose business processes—integrated
end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and
customers—can respond with flexibility and speed to any customer
demand, market opportunity, or external threat.
n the e-business On Demand era, companies will move beyond simply integrating
their processes to actually being able to sense and respond to fluctuating
market conditions and provide products and services to customers on
their terms . . . on demand. Companies will be able to acquire business
functions or IT infrastructure over the Internet as they need them and
only pay for what they need. Companies can quickly increase or decrease
their requirements as their markets change. IBM has developed products
and services that meet the business and infrastructure requirements
for enabling business on demand and can help customers begin building
their on demand capabilities today.
In on demand e-business requires end-to-end integration. Companies
must have an integrated infrastructure to enable agile business processes
that initiate new value chains so companies can excel in new arenas.
Enterprises need to connect all their business processes and leverage
them as a whole, not as silos of stand alone applications. To achieve
maximum business advantage, e-business should transform an enterprise
by reducing costs, increasing productivity, fueling growth, and improving
services. Customers and Partners expect an integrated demand-to-delivery
environment, which enables them to present a single and consistent view
of their business to users—no matter what part of the business
process the user happens to interact with.
Figure 1: The Stages of e-business Adoption
Getting to e-business on demand is a natural progression that typically
goes through these stages shown in Figure 1:
- Access: Enable transactions against core business systems using
simple Web publishing and point solutions.
- Enterprise integration: Use the Web to integrate business processes
across enterprises. Link internal and external systems, both across
enterprises and beyond enterprise boundaries.
- e-business on demand: Use the Web to adapt dynamically to customer
and market requirements. Change business models. Combine people, technologies,
and processes in new ways.
An on-demand business has these characteristics:
- Responsive: Able to sense changes in the environment and to respond
dynamically to unpredictable fluctuations in supply or demand, emerging
customer, partner, supplier and employee needs, or unexpected moves
by the competition.
- Variable: Able to adapt cost structures and business processes
flexibly, to reduce risk, and to drive business performance at higher
levels of productivity, cost control, capital efficiency, and financial
predictability.
- Focused: Committed to concentrating on core competencies and differentiating
tasks and assets; able to use tightly integrated strategic partners
to manage tasks ranging from manufacturing, logistics, and fulfillment
to human resources and financial operations.
- Resilient: Prepared for changes and threats like computer viruses,
earthquakes, or sudden spikes in demand.
The road to becoming an on-demand e-business requires integration
at all levels. The rest of this paper describes the overall e-business
integration stack, and shows how to address the complexity of e-business
integration through the best practices of IBM patterns for e-business.
2 THE E-BUSINESS INTEGRATION STACK
As shown in Figure 2, businesses that are highly responsive to the
dynamic, unpredictable demands of customers, partners, suppliers, and
employees require a range of integration technologies to fully address
each aspect of enterprise integration. Technology has become tightly
woven into the fabric of business systems, and so each level of integration
can have an impact on the flexibility of the system, the cost of integrating
new processes or technologies, and the overall stability and manageability
of business systems.
Each of these integration levels is being guided by two distinct forces:
business drivers and technology drivers.
Business-driven integration capabilities help integrate business processes,
applications, information, and user roles. These capabilities enable
companies to deliver a holistic view of their value-chain and business
relationships. This, in turn, can change occasional customers into repeat
purchasers, reluctant business partners into strategic allies, and employees
into efficient, informed team members.
Technology-driven integration capabilities help integrate the underlying
IT infrastructure that supports business processes, such as directory
services, security policies, storage, and operating environment. These
capabilities enable companies to reduce their total cost of ownership
by using all the computing resources in an IT environment more efficiently.
Companies can do more with existing assets without compromising the
availability and security of the infrastructure.
Together, the following end-to-end integration capabilities are required
to give companies a competitive edge:
- Business Process Integration: Companies need rapid access to new
ways of achieving business objectives, such as running and building
the business and finding new applications to help manage the business.
Moving from an environment of disconnected business processes to optimized
and integrated processes requires modeling, automating, and combining
manual, automated, and new processes—throughout an organization
and across their value-chain with partners, customers, suppliers,
and distributors.
- User Role Integration: While the Web potentially gives customers,
suppliers, partners, and employees anytime/anywhere access to information,
transactions, and know-how, companies still need to provide a personalized,
integrated, interactive view of their business. Key integration requirements
include role-based, preference-based, and device-based transformation
of business transactions and information.
Figure 2: The e-business Integration “Stack”
- Application Integration: Most businesses have islands of applications—some
homegrown, some legacy, and some packaged. They are isolated by incompatible
data formats and communication protocols and do not speak a common
language. To connect these islands and make their output available
where and when it is needed requires information connectivity. In
addition, businesses need build to integrate capabilities that enable
them to rapidly create and deploy new applications for integration
with existing applications inside and outside the enterprise.
- Information Integration: Many organizations today have islands
of information that limit their ability to view current, comprehensive
data; share information across the value chain; and gain insight to
drive strategic initiatives. Information comes in many forms, such
as structured, unstructured, relational, and file. By integrating
these islands through federated data access and content management,
an organization can provide a holistic view of a business to customers,
employees, and partners that can be efficiently searched or mined
for trends.
- Directory/Security Integration: Providing access to a heterogeneous,
e-business infrastructure for customers, employees, partners, and
suppliers introduces a number of security-related challenges related
to the use of multiple security mechanisms, such as authentication
and authorization. For example, it is common for a single person to
be represented by multiple user identities in multiple registries
or directories. These multiple security registries, such as SAP, Lotus®
Notes®, AS/400, Kerberos, and Public Key Infrastructure, each
have a unique method of User Identification, for example, JohnD, JDoe,
or JD. Software vendors continually define new security registries,
yet existing ones do not disappear. As organizations attempt to enable
new customers or business partners to access existing systems, integration
capabilities are needed to provide single sign-on, consistent security;
minimal duplication of directory information; and common policy-driven
administration across the heterogeneous hardware, middleware, and
applications chosen for all of the diverse solutions in an IT environment.
- Storage Integration: Just as most IT infrastructures have a diversity
of applications, information, and operating environments, most use
numerous and varied storage types. Ultimately, IT organizations want
to lower total cost of ownership in these mixed environments through
integrated monitoring and management of storage. Efficiency in managing
storage and leveraging all storage capacity is a key requirement of
enterprises today.
- Operating Environment Integration: Today's e-business applications,
which usually span multiple operating platforms and several network
hops, require new end-to-end integration capabilities. For example,
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) cannot be monitored or enforced without
end-to-end workload management. Providing policy-driven management
of a heterogeneous distributed server infrastructure and self-management
of individual servers are key integration requirements., and these
can further be customized to meet the unique requirements of the enterprise.
3 DIVING INTO USER ROLE INTEGRATION
So let us do a quick dive into the user role integration. To support
our discovery of the details, we will use the patterns for e-business
that I introduced in my last paper (http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_03/column3.)
In particular, the access integration patterns describe the best practices
to support user role integration.
Access Integration patterns describe the services and components commonly
required to provide users with consistent, seamless, secure, device-independent
access to relevant applications and information. Access Integration
patterns are useful when:
- Users need access to multiple applications and information sources
via a single sign-on and application-independent security context.
- Applications need to be accessible via multiple device types, including
fat clients, browsers, voice response units, mobile devices, and PDAs.
- There is a requirement to provide a common look and feel to a collection
of applications or to aggregate result sets from discrete applications
in a business process.
- The user wishes to customize the choice of applications and how
they are presented.
- The business wishes to target information and applications to a
specific user or group.building, deploying and managing the solution.
Access Integration patterns observed in practice are composed of the
following services:
- Presentation: Presentation services are the foundation of a universal
desktop for all the Web-based applications of an enterprise. These
services provide a common look and feel and language transparency
across multiple applications. Portals are rapidly emerging as a strategic
Internet and intranet tool to provide users with a personalized, single
point of access to Web applications and resources. A portal allows
the company to control access to and presentation of applications
while empowering users to choose presentation options that best fit
their individual preferences. Another best practice for achieving
a unified, manageable interface is to clearly separate the content
from the presentation style at the content creation stage using technologies
such as XML and XSL. Separation of presentation from a standard data
set also helps to enable support for mobile devices, by allowing the
data to be formatted according to the user's access device on the
fly.
- Personalization: The Personalization service enables users and
the enterprise to shape the choice, style and format of applications.
Personalization may be done at many levels (individual, group, role),
and it relies heavily on other services, such as Presentation and
Security. The key functions of the Personalization services include
user identification, user profile retrieval and update, content selection
that matches the user's preferences, and content assembly and delivery.
In order to achieve these goals across multiple applications, the
high-level personalization logic must be implemented separately from
the applications it supports. Such externalization provides a common
level of personalization support and enables easier integration with
other applications in the future.
- Security and Administration: The Security and Administration service
enables users to access multiple applications and information sources
via an integrated security model and a single set of security credentials.
a key requirement is a single sign-on, so that a user logs on once
to gain access to all the appropriate applications and data sources.
Another key requirement is access management, which limits access
based on a user profile and the content access policies of the enterprise.
Because applications are made accessible to many different users or
user groups, access management is typically role-based and hierarchical.
For example, a person who assumes a new managerial role may need their
access to a set of applications revised automatically according to
the update in their profile. A best practice for achieving these requirements
is to externalize authentication services from individual applications
into a single common Security and Administration service node. This
can be achieved by developing an enterprise-wide directory of users
and their access permissions using technologies such as LDAP directories.
- Pervasive Device Support: The Pervasive Device Support service
enables users of a wide range of devices to access the same set of
applications. Pervasive Device Support encompasses both the access
device (browser, phone, PDA, GUI client) and the transport medium
employed (HTTP, voice, WML, IM). From experience, a best practice
for implementing Pervasive Device Support isto externalize the services
from the applications. We externalize these services by instituting
a device support node that accepts data from existing applications
in some common format, such as XML, and transforms it into a format
that is compatible with the user's device type through a process called
transcoding . The transcoding server then sends the data to the user
device using a device- and/or network-specific protocol. For example,
when the client is a WAP-enabled phone, the program that accesses
the back-end system typically assembles the data as an XML document.
The transcoding server then transforms this document into a Wireless
Markup Language (WML) document and sends it to the cell phone using
the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) for transmission across a
GSM network.
The following are the commonly observed application patterns for Access
Integration:
- The Pervasive Device Access application pattern provides a structure
for extending the reach of browser or fat client-based applications
to pervasive devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. The application
pattern leverages the Pervasive Device Support and Security and Administration
services above. The Pervasive Device Access tier receives requests
from pervasive devices and converts them into the appropriate requests
that can be understood by existing applications and converts the response
from these existing applications into formats that can be rendered
by the pervasive device. The implementation of this Application pattern
calls for a careful examination of the placement of the transcoding
logic and its influence on the dialogue mapping. Transcoding logic
placed within an enterprise's infrastructure (on its Web server) allows
flexible or tight control over the mapping of a dialogue to the form
and size of the access device, such as a mobile phone or a Palm Pilot.
This placement assumes a tight linkage of the user community to the
enterprise and some IT sophistication to run a wireless infrastructure.
- The Single Sign-On application pattern provide a framework for
seamless application access through unified authentication services.
In this section, we will discuss two Application patterns for single
sign-on, a basic pattern where the single-sign on functions are performed
in the Web tier, and an extended pattern where the security context
is extended to include the back-end systems. The application pattern
leverages the Security and Administration service above. Having a
single source for authentication services could create a single point
of failure for dependent applications. Care must be taken to provide
for high availability of this service. Typically, Single Sign-On works
well to support authentication services only, leaving the supported
applications to handle their own authorization as appropriate. Combination
of these services is generally possible only with new applications
that can make use of the common services from the start. Extending
the security context to include the back-end systems enables non-repudiation
of back-end system transactions. For solutions with strong privacy
and/or audit requirements, this approach is needed. These solutions
will almost always require a centralized user administration model.
Examples include financial services transactions and access to health
care clinical document systems.
- The Personalized Delivery application pattern provides a framework
for giving access to applications and information tailored to the
interests and roles of a specific user or group. This pattern extends
basic user management by collecting rich profile data that can be
kept current up to the user’s current session. Data collected
can be related to application, business, personal, interaction, or
access device-specific preferences. The application pattern leverages
the Personalization, Security and Administration services and Pervasive
Device Support above. Successful implementation of the Personalized
Delivery pattern requires a careful examination of business rules,
business objectives, and applications’ ability to interact with
the Personalization services. Without definition of clear, measurable
success criteria for implementation and careful results tracking,
costs can quickly spiral beyond the plan without recognizing tangible
benefit.
For the Runtime patterns, we often realize the benefits of Access
Integration patterns best when these services are combined. For example,
the Personalization service and the Pervasive Device Support service
require the use of the Presentation service to create the user interface.
The Pervasive Device Support, Personalization, and Presentation services
require the Security and Administration service to be effective. System
designers can mix and match these services to facilitate consistent
and seamless access to multiple applications. Figure 3 shows the combined
runtime pattern for the Single Sign On and Personalized Delivery application
patterns.
Figure 3: Applying the Access Integration Patterns
In summary, e-business integration is a very important phase in a companys’
evolution to become an on-demand e-business. The complexity of e-business
integration can only be addressed by well defined architectures, patterns,
technologies and products/tools.
About the author
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Mahesh Dodani is an e-business architect
with IBM Software Group. His primary interests are in enabling individuals
and organizations to tackle complex e-business industry solutions.
He can be reached at dodani@us.ibm.com
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Cite this column as follows: Mahesh Dodani: "Don't Rip and Replace,
Integrate!", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 2,
no. 3, May-June 2003, pp. 23-31. http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_05/column3
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