Collaborative Business Applications: Part II Extended Business Processes

Transcription

1 Collaborative Business Applications: Part II Extended Business Processes In the first part of this series, I described how SOA could be used to add collaboration capabilities to enterprise applications, how these services compare to the business services we usually think of with SOA, and where the services fit into an overall n-tier enterprise application architecture. So, what is the point of all this? Let s look at an example business process, before and after. Example Business Process New collaboration capabilities have the potential to enhance and extend business processes and particularly the management, monitoring, reporting and optimization of our business. Today, process management and automation is limited by the capabilities of BPM and transactional systems. So, before many business transactions occur, we might have a significant amount of manual activities that are not managed as part of a business interaction. Consider this simplified example of a contracting transaction for publishing an RFP, selecting the contractor, and issuing the contract. The Contracting office has numerous interactions with the potential contractors that have responded to the RFP, including exchanges, telephone conversations, and the exchange of documents. For example, Contracting may have posted an RFP to which the applicant responded with an and electronic version of their initial proposal. After a few exchanges, the Contract officer calls the contractor on the phone for a qualifying interview and to set up subsequent interviews with the hiring organization. After all of that is completed, a contract offer is sent, terms are negotiated, and the offer is amended and accepted. Finally, the Contracting office executes a New Contract transaction into the ERP system. In most cases, none of the exchanges between the candidate and Contracting are tracked or preserved. Typically, only the automated New Contract part of the overall business transaction is recorded, managed and optimized. Or even if the system is capable of managing some of the manual tasks through workflow, it cannot easily collect and integrate the data from the human interactions. In general, they are not associated with the business transaction and are not subject to analysis and continual improvement activities. 1

2 Out of Band Interactions Business Transaction Phone New Contract Contractor Documents Contract Office ERP Complete, collaborative transaction Network as a Platform for Composite Applications 2007 Cisco Inc. All rights reserved. 1 Improving the Transaction Figure 1 Typical Interactive Transaction Now, let s look at how the overall transaction could be managed differently using new collaboration technologies, as illustrated in Figure 2. First, the hiring manager posts a draft RFP on an internal wiki. The interested stakeholders review and edit the posting to include subject matter details and other information. Many people have different ideas about what the new contract ought to achieve, so the wiki provides a way for the many different ideas to be debated and a final set of deliverables to be agreed upon. The overall debate is easy to review, and each person can participate when and where it is convenient for them. Then, the contracting office reviews and edits the posting to conform to corporate guidelines, add generic content, and align it with contract categories. Because, only Contracting has the authority to finalize the posting, policy-based access controls determine who can create, edit, see, approve and finalize content. Next, the overall bidding transaction starts with the posting of the RFP on one or more electronic boards. The potential contractor s and documents are received and logged. The proposal is reviewed and entered into a document management system so that it can be accessed later. Each subsequent interaction between the contract officer and the contractor is logged including the data that each contained. The same holds true for the voice conversations, which are logged as part of the transaction, along with the contents of the conversations. Given today s requirements for auditing and compliance, and potential legal liabilities, it is more important than ever to have all communications and every aspect of the contracting process tracked, recorded, and integrated together. 2

3 RFP Wiki Create Posting Manager Video Conference Contractor Scheduling Addressing Schedule Interviews Stakeholder / SME RFP Document Management System Manage Proposals Initiate New Contract Voice Iterative communications Contract Office Network as a Platform for Composite Applications 2007 Cisco Inc. All rights reserved. 2 Figure 2 - Improved Collaborative Application An interview schedule is set up by Contracting between the stakeholders and the potential contractor using shared calendar, address book and scheduling capabilities of the collaborative workspace. Since the organization is distributed globally, some interviews are in person, while others are done via video conferences. Before each interview, the interviewer retrieves the proposal from the document management system. Afterwards, they enter their comments into a discussion forum on the wiki. Again this provides a transparent mechanism to debate the pro s and con s of each particular candidate and compare them against each other, all the while keeping track of why a particular decision was reached. After all the candidates are interviewed by everyone involved, the stakeholders cast their vote for their preferred contractor using the community voting capabilities of the collaborative workspace. Finally, an offer is made to the contractor, they accept the offer and the New Contract business transaction on the ERP system is executed, as part of the overall Issue RFP Contract enterprise transaction. Using the tracking and history of the collaborative workspace, the organization is able to manage and optimize the contracting process by analyzing the overall transaction, including all human interactions between the candidates, Contracting, and the hiring organization. In addition, auditing of the process is enhanced with the ability to search the contents of any interactions. Questions of propriety are quickly dealt with by examining any and all content of the complete, long running, combined, human and automated enterprise transaction. In addition, the new, collaborative workspace supports corporate governance requirements. Appropriate participation in the process and legitimate access to different aspects of data are managed through policy-based access. For example, contracting must know and track all of the demographic details of each candidate contractor including age, race, and gender. However, this information cannot be used to determine whether a contractor will be chosen to participate in the interview process. Policies define what information is available to which roles, and are automatically enforced by the collaborative workspace environment. At the end of the new process, the right RFP was created to best support the overall requirements of the organization. All participants understood the rationale for the particular requirements and deliverables and were able to buy into what that meant for them. Interviews 3

4 were effectively conducted across geographies and time zones. The best contractor was selected through a transparent process that removed any doubts about qualifications or favoritism, and performance metrics were applied to remove unnecessary steps from previous versions of the process. Improving the Transaction Let s review the concepts of SOA in relation to tiers and infrastructure to see how these work together to form the next generation collaboration application architecture. Figure 3 shows two different implementations of a sample SOA solution for a contracting process. The example on the left shows the typical view of SOA in the industry today, where business processes, such as the Contracting, are supported by a layer of business services, such as Contractor Relationships, Compliance Management, and Contract Issuance, which are themselves supported by a service based integration layer connecting to the existing and legacy applications. If we position this SOA approach with tiers, we see that all of the typical SOA services fall into the logic tier of a typical 3 tiered architecture Presentation RF P Process Contractor Svc In te gratio n Business Logic Co mpliance Svc Co ntractin g Proc ess Co ntract Svc I ntegration Logic Unified Communications RFP Process Contractor Svc Application Logic Collaboration s Business Logic Compli ance Svc Integrati on App lication s Con tr acting Process Cont ract Svc New SONA s T raditional SOA s Resource 3 Tiered n - Tiered Net work as a Platfo rm for Com po site App lication s Cisco Inc. All r ight s re ser ved. 3 Figure 3 - SOA and Tiers As an alternative, the n-tiered example on the right has broken the logic into the two types, application logic and business logic. The application logic is implemented in the workspace tier as a set of application services, such as collaboration, and unified communications that enrich application capabilities, tracking, auditing, and user interaction. These services enable the next generation of collaborative applications with reusable capabilities and represent an important evolution in thinking about SOA. Instead of only thinking about business services, we now think about services to provide rich user experiences, and, understand where they fit into our architecture, corresponding to proven architectural principles and the roles and responsibilities of the application tiers. 4

5 In Part I, I defined SOA as an architectural style for structuring logic through the use of composable services, but it is not an end-to-end architecture. Currently, it is mostly used to compose business services and enterprise processes, but this limitation is self imposed. New business processes can take advantage of application and collaboration services to extend both the enterprise and the lifecycle of a business transaction. These new services, along with traditional business services can provide the capabilities we need to create a new generation of collaborative enterprise solutions. 5