|
To stay competitive, today's organizations need a rigorously defined framework to
capture a representation of the entire organizational system in all its dimensions and
complexity. The Enterprise Architect (EA) is responsible for spanning between the business
design and the information system that codifies the design and back. The EA must
understand the principles, processes, and tools used to create a business design. The EA
also needs to understand the methodologies that are going to be used to translate business
design into a derived information system design. They need to understand what assets
already exist in the information system that implements portions of the design, and the
techniques for accessing those assets within the overall design. Finally, they need to
understand how the middleware provides support for ensuring resiliency in the face of
disruption, protection against abuse, and efficient use of various resources.
The EA may be directly involved in the translation of business design into
the solution architecture at a project by project basis, or may take a higher
level role in setting the basic principles, guidance and corporate standards
that then are used by solution architects in their individual solution projects.
A lot of this will depend on the size and complexity of your business and
how much of that complexity shows up in your information systems.
Take advantage of the contents in this kit to help you become an IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer and get access to other courseware for EA professionals.
To keep up with market trends and competition, a thriving enterprise must be flexible and able to adapt its strategies swiftly. Often enterprise IT lacks the necessary agility to keep pace with this shifting environment. For your enterprise IT department to flourish and adapt to quickly changing conditions, IT needs to enhance its capability and maturity to align itself with business demands -- move away from IT-centric solutions and toward creating business-focused solutions.
To accomplish this alignment, enterprise architects build business models -- one layer
of the organization's SOA. They break the business down into a component view,
modeling discrete processes and business processes that support the entire enterprise.
Business process management maps a company's business processes and helps distinguish:
- Business processes that provide strategic differentiation over competitors
- Core processes
- Business processes that may not be strategic to the business
Component Business Modeling (CBM) is an end-to-end way of looking at the business
through all the layers -- not just the business layer, but the application layer and
IT infrastructure, too. The combination of the views of all the layers is the
foundation for smart recommendations concerning the enterprise and a key component of
an SOA. By linking the model with SOA, enterprise architects can also address the underlying IT infrastructure.
SOA is an approach for designing and implementing distributed systems that allows a tight correlation between the business model and the IT implementation. SOA enables organizations to align their IT model with business needs in a flexible way and helps define composite applications -- applications that draw upon functionality from multiple sources to support horizontal business processes.
 |
Understanding SOA: Key Terms
- Service: a repeatable business task, such as check customer credit or open account
- Service orientation: a way of integrating your business processes as linked
services, and the outcomes that these services bring
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): an IT architectural style that supports
service orientation
- Composite application: a set of related and integrated services that support a
business process built on SOA
|
|
By applying SOA concepts and principles, companies can:
- Align business and IT goals and objectives
- Drive increased flexibility into their IT systems
- Meet rapidly changing business requirements through increased responsiveness
How do you go about establishing an SOA? The best practice is to create a service model and associated life cycle to ensure that services are defined, built, deployed, and maintained in conjunction with established principles, policies, and practices.
The SOA life cycle includes the following phases: model, assemble, deploy and manage.
- Model - During the model phase architects and other members of the organization gather business requirements and design optimal business processes to meet these requirements.
- Assemble - The optimized business processes are realized in the assemble phase by combining new and existing services to form composite applications.
- Deploy - In the deploy phase, these assets are then deployed into a secure and integrated environment that leverages specialized services. These services help the organization integrate people, processes and information.
- Manage - During the manage phase, the entire service model is managed and monitored from both an IT and a business perspective. Information gathered during this phase is used to gain real-time insight into business processes, enabling better business decisions and feeding information back into the life cycle for continuous process improvement.
Underpinning all of these life cycle stages is governance and processes, which establishes principles, policies, and practices and ensures they are realized through the SOA -- resulting in an agile IT environment aligned with changing business needs.
By using IBM's Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), the EA provides an approach to building an SOA that aligns to the business goals. SOMA also helps the EA directly tie the business processes to underlying applications through services, which can help the business realize benefits more rapidly. A key component of SOMA is the detailed identification and prioritization of services a business needs to develop or expose to support improved business processes.
IBM provides the enterprise architect with proven methodologies to get started. Find out more about how to apply these techniques inside the Enterprise Architecture Kit for SOA.
| 
