Unifying Data, Documents, and Processes
Enterprise semantics let organizations build SOA implementations that overcome arbitrary divisions among structured, unstructured, and process data
by Boris Lublinsky
| BP at a Glance |
Semantic Services-Oriented Architecture
Problem: SOA and business process automation are inefficient and inaccurate because enterprise data maintained in disparate systems does not adhere to the overall enterprise semantics.
Solution: Introduction of data semantics supporting structured, unstructured, and process data significantly simplifies implementation of services-oriented process orchestration.
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The three things that define any enterprise are its data, documents, and processes. Data is perceived to be the main asset of every enterprise. In the last 30 years, IT has captured terabytes of data, defining both the historical and current state of the enterprise. All of today's enterprise IT systems are geared toward entering, processing, and storing data.
Documents are legal entities that define the obligations of the enterprise and its partners at a certain point in time. Documents such as financial reports, insurance policies and claims, and government regulations typically contain data, but they are usually entered, processed, and stored in completely different systems.
Business processes define an enterprise's operations and constitute its most critical assets. Processes describe how to tie together existing applications and manual activities into a coherent enterprisewide execution.
Despite the similarities between data and documents, it is a common practice today to have completely different systems and business processes working with data and documents processing, which leads to the following issues facing today's enterprises:
- Infrastructure is duplicated; there are often two parallel middleware infrastructures, one for data and one for the documents.
- The links between data and documents containing data are often nonexistent, with the result that it is not easy to realign data with the documents.
- Enterprise business processes, which need to incorporate both data and document processing, become extremely difficult to implement.
Two major developments in today's software architecture point the way toward resolving these issues. First, services-oriented architecture (SOA) embraces business process as one of its major components. It also separates services' internal data representation from their exposed interfaces, thus allowing for the introduction of enterprise semantics with minimal impact on applications. Second, the introduction of XML as a universal data/documents representation allows for a unified model of documents and data.
Taking advantage of these technology trends, organizations can finally realize a strategy that begins to unify data, documents, and business processes into a single harmonious execution.
The Process-Centric Enterprise
SOA is an architectural style that promotes the concept of business process orchestration of enterprise-level business services. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship among the three major elements of SOA: services, processes, and organization. SOA models the enterprise as a collection of business services that are accessible across the enterprise. Monolithic stovepipe applications are broken down in favor of self-contained business services aligned with enterprise business artifacts. These services can be invoked using a standard protocol, thus ensuring their availability across the enterprise and beyond.
Business processes orchestrate the execution of enterprise services to fulfill required enterprise business functions such as order processing or claims processing. The organization owns all of the SOA artifacts (services and processes) and governs their creation, usage, access, and maintenance.
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