BPM Cloud

Best Practices & Principles

Best Practices & Principles of Service Orientation

To warrant a successful Service Orientation implementation, the enterprise needs to enforce SOA’s principles and policies and follow and leverage best practices. Key Service Orientation principles and best practices that advance a dynamic IT integration technology and promote agile IT solutions include:

  • Perform careful planning

    You must perform careful planning to identify the correct services to be provided and consumed using appropriate service modeling methodologies. Work out a fit adoption strategy and set pragmatic objectives. Pick up a few critical business processes to develop as enterprise-wide services. Define a roadmap for creating an application architecture that conforms to SOA best practices.

  • Approach as a business architecture - a way to structure the enterprise

    Service orientation should be approached first as business architecture and modeling and a way to structure the enterprise. Then and only then it is approached as an IT integration technology. IT teams should work more directly with the business to define the strategic directions and the business processes.

  • Service-orientation must facilitate integration

    Business logic is broken down into components and presented as services for consumer applications. The services are loosely coupled with interface that is independent of the implementation. Applications can be built by composing one or more services without knowing the underlying implementations of the consumed services. The physical linkage between deployed services is implemented in an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - a common distributing and delivery network for services.

  • Adopt Service Technology

    Services must be designed to comply with two set of principles:
    - Service Interface Principles
    Services must be built to obey 3 key interface related principles - technology neutral (independent of endpoint platform), standard (standards-based protocols) and consumable (implementing service registry to automate discovery and usage).
    - Service Design Principles
    Enforce service design principles to achieve quality services with built-in adaptability and that are easy to use and manage, and can capture and deliver the business functions. Each service is qualified with a quality of service (QoS) attributes. Key QoS components are security requirements (authentication and authorization), messaging reliability, and invocation policies.

  • Maximize Service Reusability

    Services should be reusable across as much of the organization as possible to capture the full benefit of service orientation. Characteristics that maximize service usability include service interface design, loose coupling, coarse-grain service design, and using interoperable and location –transparent communication protocols. Services designed for reuse have to be easy to find, build, consume, understand, and reliable to use. Service’s consumers only need to know what the service does, where it is, and how they can use it. The service’s interface defines how the service can be invoked and is the only thing of significance to the consumer. It is more appropriate to acquire certain commodity services from specialized trusted external sources. The services must be provided at an optimal level of granularity in order to maximize reusability and provide flexibility in consumption by the business process.

  • Support advanced Service Registry

    Design and implement an enterprise-wide service registry. A service registry provides you with facilities to publish and discover services and allows you to organize information about services. Service providers can disclose information about their offered services in the registry and potential clients (applications) can look up the services in the registry and invoke the services. Universal Description, Definition, and Integration (UDDI) is the standard used for service registry. A new service added in the enterprise IT system needs to be registered in the service registry in order to be consumed using the appropriate discovery mechanism. A service registry is one of the fundamental pieces of service orientation for achieving reuse and gaining potential cost savings that result from the reuse of existing services. The reuse of services greatly depends on the ability to describe and publish the offered functionality of the services to potential consumers and client applications.

  • Create effective Governance

    Critical to successful service orientation of the enterprise is building efficient governance over the implementation and for the design and deployment of services. Every reusable service design must go through a central quality assurance process. Governance can enforce the consistency of the service design and development strategy and compliance with the policies, rules, practices and principles of the SOA. Efficient governance requires the contribution of the whole organization.
    - Develop and enforce design-time governance to define policies and rules for selection, design and deployment of services, reuse of service assets, and service enablement of legacy applications.
    - Sustain standard processes and preserve consistency for development of services, service-based applications, and service-oriented systems and infrastructure.
    - Establish run-time governance model to create and apply procedures for readying, running and managing service-based processes and applications, imposing rules and restrictions, and monitoring the use of and execution of services.
    - Evolve your cross-organization governance model to incorporate procedures to build and monitor service-level agreements (SLAs) between providers and consumers of services and to place policies for identifying and binding to external services.

  • Deploy robust Enterprise Service Bus

    Deploy robust Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) that can enable and facilitate flexible integration of systems and applications within your enterprise and across your customer-facing processes, business partners and supply chain. ESB is a common distributing network for services and is essential to provide a framework for service-oriented integration. Services communicate with messages and the ESB will take care of the message transformations and routing. Developers can find the services, including Web services, easily because they were exposed as services on the ESB. Work with your package software vendors to connect their applications into the ESB.

    The ESB, as the heart of the service orientation environment, has to be very reliable, secure and highly available. An ESB enables applications to create service interfaces for new or existing application functions directly or indirectly through adapters. It provides support for all required existing applications, programming models, and data formats.

  • Exploit and apply the SOA tools and methodologies

    Exploit and apply the available SOA tools, methodologies and programming models for simulating and automating the design of business processes and applications and for building, accessing, invoking and composing services used to assemble and execute at runtime business processes. Service orientation replaces complex software and hardware dependencies with service modules that can be easily replaced, modified, assembled and deployed in a granular framework across a virtualized infrastructure.

  • Develop Service Virtualization

    Develop service virtualization as an approach to deploying and managing services and which supplies the plumbing foundation for supporting the entire service-oriented processes and applications and on which one can plug new service functionality. It provides a dynamic framework for exposing services and enabling sharing (reusability) of services and enforcement of policies. This represents a shift from device, hardware and software management to services management. Think services – the service orientation journey!

Service Orientation of the Enterprise

The prime leverage from service orientation of the enterprise is to align the enterprise IT capacities with the business and to enable the IT to respond with high agility and efficiency to market changes and business growth.

From a business perspective, service orientation (SO) is a means of structuring and integrating the business as clusters of linked services. Here it is crucial that the enterprise makes a fundamentally new approach to the way it builds and automates it business processes and constructs its business models and software. It is critical you think hard about how to define your own business as a set of separate services. The ultimate goal is to enable the enterprise to deliver and consume most of its business applications and software capabilities as well designed services. Many of current enterprise applications are monolithic and have evolved to become overly complex to be truly efficient and agile. A quick time to market (QTM) can be achieved only by creating a service oriented environment with agile and flexible business applications. Service orientation enables businesses to make effective decisions sustained by dynamic technology instead of arriving at limited business decisions constrained by IT technology.

Service orientation implements an enterprise integration approach using service capabilities and technologies. It incorporates and combines service definition, orchestration, description, registration, discovery, and distribution and delivery technologies. The physical connection and linkage between deployed services is generally implemented in an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which is a common distributing and delivery network for services. Service orientation should adhere to principles of SOA (service oriented architecture) to enable the enterprise to inventory and restructure its IT portfolio into building blocks of indispensable services primary for supporting business processes and operations. Fine-grained services can be combined quickly and easily to create coarse-grained business functionality. Applying and implementing SOA principles and best practices, enterprises can gain a great flexibility in building business processes and applications in rapid and agile ways by leveraging established service assets and existing application infrastructure to compose new business services.

Service orientation deployment calls for an enterprise-wide reengineering effort that must engage the business stakeholders to collaborate with the IT teams and should address all the enterprise business automation layers - business, IT infrastructure, applications, and organizational structure. Many organizations are reaching a pain point from decades of building what has become an overly complex and inflexible infrastructure. Service orientation is an incremental journey that organizations need to take. The deployment should be staged in carefully planned multi phases.

We help your enterprise on its journey to start and deploy successful service orientation in order to enable business agility and innovate through services and expand via internal and external dynamic integration. Leveraging IBM resources, we guide your organization in developing and planning custom approach for implementing sustainable and transforming service orientation environment.

 

Business Process Management (BPM) – powerful integrated capabilities to accelerate your business growth

BPM is a new modern model-driven approach for designing and managing business processes. Great flexibility and agility can be attained when most core business processes are transformed to the new model. Using model-driven approach, changes in business processes have to be made in the process model and this then automatically changes the behavior of the executable software code describing the process’s IT workflow. This way the IT is brought in alignment with the business - the promise of SOA. Service Orientation is also seen in alignment with BPM and enterprises now frequently combine new Service Orientation and BPM projects.

For SOA enablement of BPM, a set of integrated capabilities are required to design, simulate, implement, test, deploy, and manage enterprise BPM solutions. This set of integrated capabilities includes four basic components – process modeling, service-based process IT work flow generation, run-time process execution and application monitoring.

IBM offers a robust BPM portfolio for building end-to-end BPM solutions. At the core it consists of a set of tightly integrated WebSphere® BPM products (Business Modeler, Integration Developer, Process Server & Business Monitor). You can use these IBM products together to plan and deploy a BPM solution optimal for your enterprise business. You begin the cycle using the Modeler to simulate and design an optimal business process. The modeled business process can be exported by the Modeler as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for implementation. Then using Integration Developer you transform the business process model to an executable IT workflow. This transformation is accomplished by mapping the model activities scheme to reusable service building blocks to assemble composite business applications. The Process Server provides the run-time environment to execute and manage the application you generated. The Monitor allows real time performance monitoring of the application. (Click here for more information about the IBM BPM offering).

The assembled business processes and composite applications are described in and executed from a work flow engine. The work flow represents the logical link between the assembled services. The actual physical connection between the deployed services is commonly implemented in a message-based ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). At run-time the flow engine calls and invokes the services in the order specified in the BPEL input to the work flow engine.

The business performance key indicators and parameters are monitored in real time and then fed back into the business modeling tool to refine and optimize the business process of your company. All the processes required to run the enterprise business need to run smoothly and in sync with each other. BPM thus enables optimization of business processes and infrastructure through flexible and standardized integration framework.

The different BPM capabilities are stand-alone and can be employed independently or in a mix. BPM is not all-or-none offering. Enterprises can deploy BPM capabilities and solutions incrementally in a staged approach as their business needs expand and at their own pace. The starting point for BPM deployment is largely determined by the enterprise business priorities, strategic and tactical needs and current IT infrastructure.

We help your enterprise on its journey to start and deploy successful BPM capabilities or integrated solutions in order to optimize and automate your business processes and give you the agility to accelerate your business growth. Leveraging IBM resources and BPM solutions, we guide your organization in developing and planning custom approach for deploying the BPM capabilities needed to optimize and transform your business.

 

Cloud Deployment on System z® Technology

Cloud computing is emerging as a dynamic and cost-effective delivery platform for supplying over the internet IT services and solutions to business and customers. It brings forth a new business model and enormous economies of scale as well. On the Cloud, IT services, applications, infrastructure resources and business processes are provisioned on demand, and deployed with great speed and scalability and irrespective of the user platform, site or place. The end users do not need to know at all about how the underlying Cloud technologies and resources are implemented and managed by the Cloud providers.

System z mainframe is in the best position for providing uniquely robust environment on which to deploy and manage Cloud. The following System z characteristics are ideal for deploying a cloud:

  • Industry-grade greatly advanced virtualization technology:
    • Very mature virtualization technology accredited for provisioning and deploying on demand and quickly a multitude of virtual servers to run concurrently and at peak efficiency.
    • Superior hypervisor with reliable monitoring capabilities, usage bookkeeping, utilization accounting and operational integrity.
    • Efficient tracking of newly created image instances in an image library.

  • Extremely secure platform crucial for Cloud adoption.

  • Very advanced and efficient capacity planning capabilities.

  • Great QoS features and robust system management attributes of System z and zEnterprise that enormously benefit the cloud infrastructure.

System z platform is configured for cloud tooling using primarily z/VM and Tivoli Automation technologies to build an infrastructure on which to deploy and manage Cloud environment (Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)). z/VM provides and manages the underlying technology for the Cloud. It provides the virtual resources (CPU, Memory, storage, network, etc…) required for generating Linux instances. Tivoli Service Automation Manager (TSAM) provides the end user the portal for requesting a cloud resource. TSAM also provides the administrator portal used by the cloud administrator to specify and deploy new requested services. TSAM communicates to the z/VM hypervisor through a dedicated all-time available Linux image.