soa-based process-centric design

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Technology that Delivers with SOA-Based Process-Centric Design

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Published on: August 2010 Author: Sridharan S|


WhitepaperTechnology that Delivers with SOA-Based Process-Centric Design

Table of Contents1. Introduction2. SOA-Based Process-Centric Design3. Guiding Design Principles4. SOA in Action5. Conclusion

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1. IntroductionA key step in application development is to capture end user needs accurately. Much of the reason systems fail to live up to their expectations is because end users often don’t speak the same language as analysts and developers. As a result, the technology developed doesn’t always address the right problems.

One of the most successful ways to deal with this issue is to adopt a process-centric approach. This involves defining and maintaining business process flows that reflect the tasks performed by the users and using these process flows as the basis of communication between end users and the development team. Taking a process-centric approach enables the organization to define the needs of the end users in a language that is familiar.

In this paper, we will examine how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based process-centric design can help to deliver significant business benefits, tighter alignment between business and IT, and agility to respond faster to ever-changing market realities.

2. SOA-Based Process-Centric DesignIn any new technology development, it is critical to identify business goals of the new system and set objectives in terms of the desired ipacts. Typically these may include: Reduced time to market Improved business agility Greater process harmonization Reduced costs Tighter alignment between business and IT

SOA-based process-centric design makes all these possible by linking computational resources, primarily applications and data, on demand to achieve the desired results for service consumers, who can be end users or other service providers.

3. Guiding Design PrinciplesWhile SOA-based process-centric design offers tremendous advantages, there is a need to understand and define the ground rules for its development, maintenance, and usage. This set of guiding principles listed below helps to influence the intrinsic behavior of a system and the way it offers services:

Reuse is the ability to expose the functionality as shared business services. Granularity is the extent to which a process or a service is broken down into smaller components. Modularity is the technique used to build larger systems by combining smaller subsystems. Componentization is the method used to expose business contracts via interfaces and thus enabling loose coupling. Interoperability is the property which enables platform, language, location, and invocation independence. Loose Coupling is the approach by which the implementation details are hidden from the caller, as a result, minimizing the changes across the integration interfaces. Service (identification, design and consumption) is the principle used in Service Oriented Analysis and Design (SOAD methodology to identify, design and consume services. Service compositability is the collection of services that can be coordinated and assembled to form composite services. Process design is the means by which a process could be optimally designed for reuse by applying granularity. Process metrics is the process of defining Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that are used to monitor and minimize bottlenecks. Versioning is the capability to enable multiple versions of services or processes to co-exist in an SOA environment.

Having understood the guiding principles of SOA-based process-centric design, let’s now see it in action.

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4. SOA in ActionConsider a business scenario that involves a loyalty system linked with multiple airline operators. Typically, customers earn reward points for the travel made and can redeem the reward points for air tickets when they have accumulated the requisite number of reward points.

Every participating airline that is part of the loyalty system has varying reward policies, which may change frequently depending on market dynamics. In addition, the loyalty system needs to be able to interface with different systems for reward booking, payment, etc.

To stay ahead of the competition, the loyalty system needs to be able to: Introduce new promotions and regulations to accelerate speed to market. Support participating airlines’ dynamic reward policies to offer business agility and complement new processes faster. Add new business partners and support changes to payment service providers with minimal development and ripple effect for increased flexibility and decreased error rates. Quickly deploy changes in business conditions to support business with improved IT capabilities.

If Miles Shortage?

Agent Online Entry

Booking Rules

FFM

Get Member’s Reward points& Enrollment details

Determine memberReward Eligibility

Member’sEnrollment

Choice?

Purchase Shortage Miles(If Any)

Error Page

BusinessRules

External System

Validate & ChargeCredit Card

CompleteRewardBooking

Not Eligible

Eligible

Eligible

Yes

No

Airline II

Airline II Airline I

Book Travel

Reward Booking

Generate RewardCertificate

BookingCompletion

Book Travel


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5. ConclusionAs you have seen, the SOA paradigm provides compelling reasons to explore its benefits when applied as domain solutions in industries such as travel. However, not every business case lends itself naturally to SOA-based process-centric design. It is important to assess if a business fits the SOA solution by examining the projected business benefits. Having assessed and initiated an SOA design, if suitable, it is important to see the implementation through to its logical end to discover the true advantages of SOA-based process-centric design.

Some best practices that should be applied in such a scenario are listed below: Apply the componentization principle: Avoid embedding business rules into the application so that a tightly coupled design doesn’t constrain business. Apply granularity, modularity, and reuse principle: Reduce time to market by enabling modifications to the business rules and process flows quickly and independent of the application code. Apply the loosely coupled invocation principle and interoperability along with service consumption pattern: Seamlessly integrate other systems like payment services, booking etc. and also consume functionality from other systems as services. Apply service identification, design, and consumption principle: Expose the repetitive business tasks as services. For example, retrieving member information, generating reward certificates, etc. Apply process design, granularity and composite-ability principle: Design the desired flight reward booking process and other optimal sub-processes. Apply process metrics, analyze the metrics and improve the business processes: Compute the number of reward booking made in a day, loss of business due to not allowing purchase of shortage miles, etc. Apply versioning principle: Define process and service validity and manage old and new versions of processes and services so that they co-exist for a certain period of time before new processes and services fully take over.


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