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As companies adapt to the realities of globalization, they face unprecedented commoditization and competition. To remain competitive, organizations must adapt more rapidly than ever before—which means that they must align their IT environments with their business goals and deliver information on demand, when and where it is needed. Companies are increasingly meeting this need for information on demand with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a business-centric approach to IT architecture that supports integration through linked, repeatable business tasks or services. SOA helps users build composite applications, which draw upon functionality from multiple sources within and beyond the enterprise to support horizontal business processes. Rapid reuse of existing assets and sharing of services and infrastructure across lines of business can be key factors in creating business processes that can adjust to changing market conditions. XML has emerged as an important driver for SOA-enabled business agility and growth because it is not tied to any specific platform, language or system. The use of SOA technology within businesses is driving an explosion of associated data—especially data represented in the XML format. Along with this widespread use of XML comes a variety of challenges associated with managing, processing, integrating and storing the data effectively.
For many businesses, SOA and XML can be the keys to making the IT department a catalyst for growth and innovation. However, most companies need guidance and best practices to help them get started and enable them to use XML to its best advantage. IBM helps address this demand by offering a broad portfolio of products, deep industry experience and expertise gleaned from hundreds of client engagements to help organizations build dynamic SOA. Information on Demand: A key advantage Today, information and business process are often captive to applications and aligned to organizational silos. This lack of a single, reliable, consolidated view of the enterprise frequently causes multiple instances of inconsistent information to exist within a single organization’s IT infrastructure, which can inhibit flexibility and diminish customer satisfaction. Instead, companies need a unified repository of master information governed by an infrastructure that makes data available across the enterprise, when and where it is needed. This Information on Demand approach can give organizations the power to better leverage critical information—helping to enforce customer centricity, provide operational intelligence, mitigate risk, simplify compliance and optimize business processes. Unlike fragile, hard-coded point-to-point integrations that can inhibit growth and adaptability, an effective XML-based information integration and management strategy unifies data across the enterprise to enable the delivery of Information on Demand. Delivered when and how the business user needs it, Information on Demand can help enrich business processes, enable key contextual insights and inspire confident business decision making.
XML enables flexible business process management Using XML, problems that are unsolvable in a relational environment can be solved. Metadata within XML documents provides instructions on how to interpret and use the data, as well as the hierarchical relationships between data elements. By providing a neutral, vendor-independent formatting standard, these capabilities facilitate highly efficient incorporation of XML documents across business boundaries. XML provides a better data model for applications that demand flexibility, schema versatility and a hierarchical structure. In the past, database management systems were unable to perform efficient operations on XML documents. Instead, database vendors provided ways to fit XML documents into the relational model. They typically accomplished this in one of two ways: either by “shredding” an XML document into data types that are supported by the database management system and spreading the data across multiple tables and rows, or by storing entire XML documents as single binary entities.
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