Successfully executed projects in a technology portfolio create the unintended consequence of larger future maintenance capital expenditures. These expenses consume on average 60% of an IT budget and as the speed of delivery increases it creates a current problem of responsiveness to business users. One solution to manage the trade-off between productivity gains and architectural integrity is to leverage enterprise level business logic through exposed services architectures. For this architecture to succeed the services must represent demanded business functions, have well defined interfaces, be platform and vendor independent, and fully interoperable.

 

Our portfolio approach is customized, business driven, incremental, and iterative. At a tactical level we expose business logic through data services, compose chunky coarse grained business services, and help users consume services through rich interfaces. Our best practices on an implementation include:

          • 1. Register contracts using UDDI registries using OASIS guidelines
          • 2. Require dynamic, self-organizing interactions
          • 3. Identify service components continuum for interactions
          • 4. Identify late binding approach for contract retrieval and processing
          • 5. Require stateless, asynchronous interactions
          • 6. Create data services layer to map/transform schema
          • 7. Implement web services model
          • 8. Provision services into providers
          • 9. Integrate services with security and policy environment

 

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ETL

Extract, transform, load (ETL) refers to three separate functions combined into a single programming tool when managing databases. First, the extract function reads data from a specified source database and extracts a desired subset of data. Next, the transform function works with the acquired data – using rules or lookup tables, or creating combinations with other data – to convert it to the desired state. Finally, the load function is used to write the resulting data (either all of the subset or just the changes) to a target database, which may or may not previously exist.

 

EAI

Typically, an enterprise has multiple legacy applications, function specific ERP applications, and databases. A firm chooses to maintain high user levels and business continuity while migrating to a set of applications that exploit newer technologies. EAI provides data connectivity and messaging services across multiple systems of record by using services such as simple bulk file transfer (e.g., FTP) to message-based broker services (e.g., WebMethods). EAI provides a strategic approach to integration applications, enabling reuse, and multi-step integration models. It also provides the foundational integration services required to enable business processes and basic transactional-oriented process management.

EII

EII is a component of the architecture framework that collects the various representations of data from across the disparate systems of record and delivers a rationalized view of the common information and data elements needed by the reusable business functions. Various commercial products enable metadata modeling capability and management to create value by being a source of data for the integration platform. This information repository and registry role is instrumental in providing aggregated data. It abstracts technology interfaces to business logic and provides users with meta-objects they can use for reporting, dashboards, or function specific interfaces.