Prabir Nandi

Conversation support for business process integration

Business process integration and automation (BPIA) has emerged as an important aspect of the enterprise computing landscape. Intra-enterprise application integration (EAI) as well as the inter enterprise integration (B2B) are increasingly being performed in the context of business processes. The integration scenarios typically involve distributed systems that are autonomous to some degree. From the BPIA perspective, the autonomy refers to the fact that the systems being integrated have their own process choreography engines and execute internal business processes that are private to them. In the case of B2B integration, the systems being integrated are fully autonomous, while various levels of autonomy exist in systems partaking in EAI. We present a new paradigm for business process integration. Our approach is based on a conversation model that enables autonomous, distributed BPM (Business Process Management) modules to integrate and collaborate. Our conversation model supports the exchange of multiple correlated messages with arbitrary sequencing constraints and covers the formatting of messages that are to be sent as well as the parsing of the messages that have been received. The crux of our conversation model is the notion of a conversation policy, which is a machine-readable specification of a pattern of message exchange in a conversation. Our model supports nesting and composition of conversation policies to provide a dynamic, adaptable, incremental, open-ended, and extensible mechanism for business process integration. We discuss the current implementation of this conversation model and early experience in applying the model to solve customer problems. The implementation utilizes distributed object technology.

Artifact-Based Transformation of IBM Global Financing

IBM Global Financing (IGF) is transforming its business using the Business Artifact Method, an innovative business process modeling technique that identifies key business artifacts and traces their life cycles as they are processed by the business. IGF is a complex, global business operation with many business design challenges. The Business Artifact Method is a fundamental shift in how to conceptualize, design and implement business operations. The Business Artifact Method was extended to solve the problem of designing a global standard for a complex, end-to-end process while supporting local geographic variations. Prior to employing the Business Artifact method, process decomposition, Lean and Six Sigma methods were each employed on different parts of the financing operation. Although they provided critical input to the final operational model, they proved insufficient for designing a complete, integrated, standard operation. The artifact method resulted in a business operations model that was at the right level of granularity for the problem at hand. A fully functional rapid prototype was created early in the engagement, which facilitated an improved understanding of the redesigned operations model. The resulting business operations model is being used as the basis for all aspects of business transformation in IBM Global Financing.

Model-driven synthesis of SOA solutions

The current approach to the design, maintenance, and governance of service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions has focused primarily on flow-driven assembly and orchestration of reusable service components. The practical application of this approach in creating industry solutions has been limited, because flow-driven assembly and orchestration models are too rigid and static to accommodate complex, real-world business processes. Furthermore, the approach assumes a rich, easily configured library of reusable service components when in fact the development, maintenance, and governance of these libraries is difficult. An alternative approach pioneered by the IBM Research Division, model-driven business transformation (MDBT), uses a model-driven software synthesis technology to automatically generate production-quality business service components from high-level business process models. In this paper, we present the business entity life cycle analysis (BELA) technique for MDBT-based SOA solution realization and its integration into service-oriented modeling and architecture (SOMA), the end-to-end method from IBM for SOA application and solution development. BELA shifts the process-modeling paradigm from one that is centered on activities to one that is centered on entities. BELA teams process subject-matter experts with IT and data architects to identify and specify business entities and decompose business processes. Supporting synthesis tools then automatically generate the interacting business entity service components and their associated data stores and service interface definitions. We use a large-scale project as an example demonstrating the benefits of this innovation, which include an estimated 40 percent project cost reduction and an estimated 20 percent reduction in cycle time when compared with conventional SOA approaches.

Core business architecture for a service-oriented enterprise

The business architecture of a service-oriented enterprise can be adequately represented through five main architectural domains: business value, structure, behavior, policy, and performance. In this paper we focus on the core business architecture, the set of essential elements in each of the five domains, and the interrelationships among these elements. The business architecture described in this paper identifies the key elements required for business reasoning and for its application to business transformation through service-oriented solutions. A business scenario involving a fictional company in the apparel business illustrates the concepts presented here.

A RESTful Architecture for Service-Oriented Business Process Execution

This paper presents a new approach to designing business process management solutions leveraging the principles of service-oriented computing and representational state transfer. We discuss the IT artifacts that underpin this new design, illustrate the design using a real world example, and present an evaluation highlighting several desirable features of our approach.

An e-business integration and collaboration platform for B2B e-commerce

The B2B e-commerce area is poised for tremendous growth. While this is a great opportunity for the system designers, the challenges are abundant as well. We list the requirements on an application platform for B2B e-commerce. We describe a framework-based approach to designing such a platform. We use design patterns to describe the frameworks on which the platform is based. These patterns illustrate how the platform supports collaborative business processes that integrate enterprise applications and trading partner systems. We present a programming model that enables the assembly of complex e-business applications on the platform.