This white paper will define different vendor approaches to developing business services and the relative cost implications of each approach for the customer.
Data integration solutions White paper
The definition of a business service for customer data integration.
By David Corrigan, product marketing manager, IBM WebSphere Customer Center
March 2006The definition of a business service for customer data integration.Page 2
IntroductionContents With the rapid growth in interest in customer data integration (CDI) applications and service oriented architectures (SOAs), many vendors have 2 Introduction rushed to define their solutions as customer data integration (CDI), service-2 Definition of a business service oriented applications. The result has been confusion: vendors who have 5 Different vendors' definitions of different applications have vastly different definitions of a service, yet they business service all claim to have a service-oriented CDI solution. Customers struggle to 5 Service-oriented application understand the subtle yet significant difference between CDI application approach vendors. One of the key points of difference is each vendor's definition of 11 Application-suite approach to CDI business service. This is a critical point for customers to understand, because 14 Application-suite CDI vendors- the primary functionality and interface into a CDI application are its business bottom line services. This paper will define different vendor approaches to developing 15 Tool and asset approach to CDI business services and the relative cost implications of each approach for the 18 Tool and asset CDI vendors- customer.bottom line18 Conclusion Definition of a business service19 For more information Gartner Group offers the most complete view of a business service and service-oriented business applications:
"What makes the current stage of this evolution noteworthy is threefold. First, the standards for defining and accessing services (key to ease of assembly) are becoming widely deployed. These are the Web services standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Second is the ability to combine these services at the time of execution, not before-so a designer is not challenged to conceive of all possible combinations of activities in advance. Third, there is a growing understanding of the right scale and content of a service-the happy mean *between too fine-grained and too complex vs. too coarse-grained and too inflexible."The definition of a business service for customer data integration.Page 3
The key definition points for a business service are that it must:
. Represent a function. Be offered at a granular, but functional, level. Be offered at a larger-grain level as an aggregate of fine-grain services. Permit integration through multiple technologies directly to the service (Web services) for both loose and tight coupling of the service, as opposed to forcing all integration through message queuing. Be able to be combined with other services into a composite transaction. Permit customization of business logic within the service
CDI business services represent customer data management functions. The primary responsibility of those functions is to maintain master customer data in the customer database. A service-oriented CDI application contains the following elements shown in the IBM WebSphere Customer Center example in Figure 1.
IBM WebSphere Customer Center core application
Large-grain Fine-grain Businessbusiness services business services object model Database
Figure 1. Elements of a service-oriented CDI applicationThe definition of a business service for customer data integrationPage 4
Large-grain business services are defined as customer data processes. Large-grain services comprise many fine-grain services and represent a significant function performed by the organization. Examples include adding a new customer or adding a contract and multiple new customers.
Fine-grain business services are defined as more atomic customer data processes or components of a larger unit of work. Fine-grain services encompass one or more objects (and therefore data tables in the database). Fine-grain services represent a level of functional abstraction above table-based create, read, update and delete functions. Examples include adding an address for a party or updating a party identifier.
An object model is defined as atomic functions. It is a specification of the objects intrinsic to the given application, incl... [download for more]
