A “Business service oriented” Approach to systems integration
The need for a coherent integration and operations backbone
A typical systems integrator (in-house or outsourced) should deliver a business driven integration
and operations platform focused on a next generation utility enterprise that can be measured for
its Service Levels in terms of cost, reliability and performance. Systems Integration solutions
should provide two distinct layers to address all these issues and requirements:
- Integration Backbone
- Operations Backbone
The Integration Backbone should be a service-oriented architecture that provides a pre-built
repository of utility industry domain specific transaction sets in which the business applications
are treated as the provider or requestor of certain services. It should also provide a reliable and
auditable infrastructure to implement these transactions in a message-oriented or a sessionoriented
integration environment.
The Operations Backbone should be an event-oriented architecture that provides a repository of
business and system events that measures the service level compliance of all automated and
human controlled business processes. The Operations Backbone will utilize these repositories to
provide a dashboard view of the business operations and enables the insertion of business
intelligence back in to the operations environment.
Deriving an integration blueprint
A typical business process in a Utility domain comprises of either or both:
- "Automated Segments - One or more automated flow of events and procedures known as a
Business Flow
- "Manual Segments - One or more instances of tasks that are initiated/controlled by human
interface
The Integration Backbone
encapsulates all the
automated segments. A
Business Flow is a non linear
or a linear automated
segment of a business
process. Each Business Flow
can have one or more atomic
integration service (or a
procedure) known as a
Business Service, which are
transactional and reusable.
These Business Services
when requested or provided
one more transactions takes
place involving push or pull
of information payload known as a message. Each Business Service shall comprise of one more
applications defined and represented as Business Components to enable the provision of these
services. A Business Component is a logical representation of entry into applications such as
CIS, WMS, OMS, GIS, etc. In summary we are now looking at an integration blueprint that is
process centric, which treats the applications as a provider of reusable services to these business
processes. This approach enables business units to assign Service Levels against these
applications in terms of performance, cost, efficiency, throughput, exception handling etc. It
further enables rapid automation of some of the manual processes that existed until now due to
lack of coherent integration architecture.
Once the integration blueprint is deployed, the Operations Backbone takes over to effectively
operate the integrated environment by ensuring and validating the Service Levels assigned by the
business units who are accountable for the business operation. The Operations Backbone
monitors both manual and automated segment of the business process to derive the measurable
determinants such as cost/customer, time/process, cost/process etc.
