Java Reference
In-Depth Information
simply rewriting working systems just for the sake of using the language of the moment.
But wrapping legacy systems with services is a good first step that allows you to gradually
create platform-independent facades for your key systems. In this way, you can eventually
reach a point where it is less expensive and time-consuming to achieve the kind of flexib-
ility you want within your enterprise.
Process improvement and automation
Process improvement and automation
Organizations may want to improve their business processes using business management
strategies such as Six Sigma or Lean. Six Sigma, for example, is a management strategy
created by Motorola in 1986 that defines five basic steps: define, measure, analyze, im-
prove, and control. Process management allows organizations to run at optimal efficiency.
While these ideas have been around for more than two decades now, we have only recently
gotten to the point where SOA can assist in management improvement efforts. The SOA
tools give us a high degree of flexibility, transparency, tracking, and analytics.
Business process management (BPM) is an approach that enables organizations to map
out their business processes, including the interactions of systems and humans, to determ-
ine how their processes actually work and to allow selective process automation with ser-
vices. This is often done with business process modeling (also BPM) tools. BPM in con-
junction with BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) is the chief means of realizing process
improvements within a SOA.
BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING TOOLS
Business activity monitoring will be a crucial aspect of SOA going forward. BAM allows companies
to define key performance indicators (KPIs) around various aspects of their services, at the business
and operational levels. A BAM-enabled SOA allows you to siphon off data as it flows across your
service invocations (in near-time or real-time) in order to help make business decisions. For example,
imagine that your company offers a New Hire service that allows people to apply for jobs, and then
takes the job applications through the process of review by the hiring manager and HR, interviewing,
hiring, and on-boarding. You define metrics around various data points in the process, and allow the
tools to generate executive dashboards, typically represented as portlets.
Presenting and understanding the data culled from BAM tools is a terrific way to make process effi-
ciency improvements. For the New Hire process, such metrics might include a ratio of interviews to
actual hires, or the average time it takes to provision an employee workstation once they are hired, or
the number of times a given hiring manager took too long to review an application, causing that point
in the process to be escalated up the organizational chain.
To get this kind of functionality, you'll need to get BAM tools and a Business Process Management
Suite from a vendor such as Oracle, TIBCO, IBM, or SoftwareAG, sometimes in conjunction with
rules engines and analytics engines such as Cognos.
