A Revolution in Agility: Business Integration Through Service Oriented Architecture

A Revolution in Agility:
Business Integration Through
Service-Oriented Architecture An Oracle White Paper Updated August 2008
A Revolution in Agility: Business Integration Through Service-Oriented Architecture
INTRODUCTION In today's rapidly changing business environment, organizations of all types face one common and persistent challenge: how to become-and remain-agile enough to satisfy ever-increasing customer expectations and accommodate new compliance mandates, all while staying ahead of the competition. The solution is business integration. Combining business process management Combining business process management (BPM) and a service-oriented approach to IT management, business integration and a service-oriented approach to IT management, business integration promotes efficiency and automation across all processes, ensuring that existing IT promotes efficiency and automation assets support actual business processes and new IT investment is focused on across all processes. maximum return. Although simple in concept, business integration has historically proven difficult to implement; however, with today's service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based approach-which puts business and IT on equal footing-and Oracle solutions and expertise, this doesn't have to be the case. By employing the strategies outlined in this white paper, organizations can ensure a graceful, gradual, and successful transition to complete business integration.
THE CHALLENGE Increasingly, organizations are looking to IT to give them the tools to map Business integration has traditionally solutions to their complex business problems, which, in turn, means giving them posed two key challenges: building a bridge between the business and IT worlds the flexible components they need to support that process. However, this type of and providing a flexible and robust business integration has traditionally posed two key challenges: building a bridge infrastructure to support that bridge. between the business and IT worlds and providing a flexible and robust infrastructure to support that bridge. Organizations typically adopt either a top-down or bottom-up approach to the task, both of which have met with little success. The top-down approach dissects business processes to arrive at specific computational operations-many of which bear little resemblance to existing software capabilities. The bottom-up approach, in contrast, builds on more-abstract computational operations to arrive at operations that often bear little resemblance to coherent business processes. To make matters worse, the infrastructure for linking individual operations is often so rigid that organizations can't adapt their business and IT mappings quickly enough to be competitive.
A Revolution in Agility: Business Integration Through Service-Oriented Architecture Page 2 THE SOLUTION By giving the business side of an organization the tools to map their processes Forrester Research has found a strong link conceptually and by providing IT departments with the tools to map existing between SOA and BPM. Indeed, a recent survey conducted by the organization services, data, and applications to those requirements, BPM and SOA make showed that 92 percent of respondents business integration possible. Together, they offer a unifying work concept for both who were implementing SOA also felt that business and IT: atomic business service. In this model, the business decomposes BPM was important for their processes into distinguishable, but minute, business services while IT builds up organization's future. existing assets and new components into the same-leading the two sides of the organization to meet in the middle. In addition, business and IT are linked by a flexible backbone, called an enterprise service bus (ESB), that aids adaptation. The result is a flexible infrastructure that allows companies to quickly add new services, swap in external services for internal services, transition from older to newer services, rearrange the sequence of services, enforce governance policies, and monitor service execution.
IMPLEMENTATION Successful business integration requires a complete platform, including . BPM suites. These allow each process to be expressed as a "story" (such as order fulfillment). . Service-enabled data integration infrastructure. This enables IT staff to supply the necessary "nouns" (such as customer an... [download for more]