Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture

Business Process Management (BPM) is used to model, simulate, automate, manage, and monitor processes, in order to coordinate operations with dynamic business priorities.

With BPM, workflows (both human and automated) are determined in real-time by events and/or outcomes within the process, and effective knowledge transfer is made possible as processes become well-documented business artifacts on which staff members can be trained.

To enjoy the full benefits of BPM, processes must integrate with existing applications and systems (e.g., hospital EHR and EMR, to name a couple of areas currently being funded by the Obama administration in the U.S.). This is where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - the subject of earlier posts - comes in. BPM and SOA are a natural match. There are links to a few of my early articles on SOA, in the bibliography at the bottom of this blog.

In preparation for my next post to this blog, I'd like to cite the following book:



This book shows the reader how to fill the semantic gap between the process model and the applications:

Modeling business processes for SOA and developing end-to-end IT support has become one of the top IT priorities. The SOA approach is based on services and on processes. Processes are focused on composition of services and in that sense services become process activities.

Experience has shown that the implementation and optimization of processes are the most important factors in the success of SOA projects. SOA is so valuable to businesses because it enables process optimization. In order to optimize processes, we need to know which processes are relevant and we have to understand them – something that cannot be done without business process modeling. There is a major problem with this approach – a semantic gap between the process model and the applications.

This book will show you how to fill this gap. It describes a pragmatic approach to business process modeling using the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and the automatic mapping of BPMN to the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which is the de-facto standard for executing business processes in SOA. The book will also cover related technologies like Business Rules Management and Business Activity Monitoring which play a pivotal role in achieving closed loop Business Process Management.

From http://www.packtpub.com/business-process-driven-SOA-using-BPMN-and-BPEL/book

Interoperability Between Oracle and Microsoft Technologies, Using RESTful Web Services - BPEL

A guide to developing REST Web services using the Jersey framework and Oracle JDeveloper 11g follows.

RESTful Web services are the latest revolution in the development of Web applications and distributed programming for integrating a great number of enterprise applications running on different platforms. Representational state transfer (REST) is the architectural principle for defining and addressing Web resources without using the heavy SOAP stack of protocols (WS-* stack). From the REST perspective, every Web application is a service; thus it's very easy to develop Web services with basic Web technologies such as HTTP, the URI naming standard, and XML and JSON parsers.

For a detailed account of how to create RESTful Web services by using Oracle technologies such as Oracle JDeveloper 11g, the Jersey framework (the reference implementation of the JAX-RS [JSR 311] specification), and Oracle WebLogic Server as well as how to consume the Web service by using Microsoft technologies such as Visual Studio .NET 2008 and the .NET 3.5 framework, click here.

Building a Web Services Network with BPEL - Caveat Emptor

Buoyed by maturing Web service standards, more and more organizations are using Web services in a collaborative environment. BPEL is fast becoming the platform for orchestrating these Web services for inter-enterprise collaboration. As discussed in earlier posts in this blog, BPEL offers the compelling benefits of a standards-based approach and loosely-coupled process integration to companies building an online marketplace or collaborative network.

Yet the exciting new capabilities offered by Web services carry some risk. In many cases, partner relationships break down or integration costs skyrocket if certain technical and administrative challenges are not addressed at design time:

* Partners must agree well in advance to conduct business according to specific criteria. Transport protocol, purpose of the interaction, message format, and business constraints have to be communicated clearly.

* Joining the network has to be an easy process; collaborative networks become successful mainly through growth.

* Users must easily find business services at runtime, or the promise of services-oriented architecture (SOA) is largely lost. (Service repositories are useful for this purpose.) If developers cannot readily find and reuse services, the services essentially don't exist.

* Partners should have the ability to monitor Web services in real-time. End users should be able to track the progress of a specific order, and trading partners diagnose a specific bottleneck within a business process.

These challenges are exacerbated when a collaborative network operates in a hosted environment. In that model, partners expose the functionality provided by their legacy applications into a Web service. This Web service is published into a centralized repository. The host is responsible for orchestrating the complex business processes, which in turn, leverage partner Web services.

Human Workflow -- Business Processes -- Service Component Architecture -- SOA -- EHR

The immediate goal of this blog is to suggest a solution for the building of state-of-the-art electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems suitable for both organizations that have already invested in a computerized infrastructure and those that have not. There are many vendors proving tools for such endeavors. Here, I have chosen one of the market leaders - Oracle - to illustrate a solution. Since the Oracle tools that I show below are standards based, the concepts will carry over to the tools provided by many of the other vendors. I'll discuss the design of a system that automates business processes when that makes sense, hands off tasks to humans where they can do the job better (according to some criterion) and that can interoperate with heterogeneous systems (local and remote) efficiently and securely. While the language that I use will sometimes be that found in the EHR literature, the solutions discussed will be widely applicable. Please note: This post is still presented in draft form.

Service Component Architecture within SOA Composite Applications

Service Component Architecture (SCA) provides a model for assembling distributed groups of service components into an application, enabling you to describe the details of a service and how services and service components interact. Composite applications are used to group service components and wires are used to connect service components. SCA helps to remove middleware concerns from the programming code by applying infrastructure declaratively to composites, including security and transactions.

An SOA composite is an assembly of services, service components, and references designed and deployed in a single application. Wiring between the services, service components, and references enable message communication. The details for a composite are stored in the composite.xml file.

Services (shown at left in figure below), such as a web services or JCA adapters, providing an entry point to the SOA composite application.

References (shown at right in figure below) send messages to external services in the outside world, such as web services and JCA adapters.



The figure below provides an example of a composite that includes an inbound service binding component, a BPEL process service component, a business rules service component, and two outbound reference binding components.



You can invoke other deployed SOA composite applications from your SOA composite application. The other applications must be deployed.









The component palette shown to the right in figure below provides the various resources that you can use in a SOA composite. It contains the following service components and adapters:

Service components

Displays the BPEL Process, business rule, human task, and mediator service that can be dragged and dropped into the designer.

Service adapters

Displays the JCA adapter (AQ, file, FTP, Database, JMS, MQ, Oracle Applications, Oracle BAM, and EJB Service), B2B binding component, SDO binding component, and web service binding component that can be dragged into the left or right swimlanes.



You add a service binding component to act as the entry point (ep) to the SOA composite application from the outside world.

You can also automatically create a service binding component by selecting "Expose as a SOAP Service" when you create a service component.

However, you cannot invoke a representational state transfer (REST) service from the SOA Composite Editor.



Activities (in the figure below) are the building blocks of a BPEL process service component. Oracle BPEL Designer includes a set of activities that you drag into a BPEL process service component. You then double-click an activity to define its attributes (property values). Activities enable you to perform specific tasks within a BPEL process service component.

A partner link (in the figure below) enables you to define the external services with which the BPEL process service component is to interact. You can define partner links as services or references (for example, through a JCA adapter) in the SOA Composite Editor or within a BPEL process service component in Oracle BPEL Designer.

The method by which you create partner links within the BPEL process in Oracle BPEL Designer impacts how the partner link displays (above) in the SOA Composite Editor. The WSDL file can be on the local operating system or hosted remotely (in which case you need a URL for the WSDL).

Adapters enable you to integrate the BPEL process service component (and, therefore, the SOA composite application as a whole) with access to file systems, FTP servers, database tables, database queues, sockets, Java Message Services (JMS), MQ, and Oracle E-Business Suite.

You can configure BPEL process monitors in Oracle BPEL Designer by selecting Monitor from the dropdown list above the Designer window. BPEL process monitors can send data to Oracle BAM for analysis and graphical display through the Oracle BAM adapter (shown in the Service Adapters section at the right of the figure below).



Oracle User Messaging Service

Oracle User Messaging Service provides a common service responsible for sending out messages from applications to devices. It also routes incoming messages from devices to applications.

You can easily send outgoing notifications from a BPEL process flow or invoke outgoing and incoming messages for tasks assigned to users from a human task.




{ Click on any of these images for a larger view }

Counter-Intuitive Considerations -- When You're Automating a Business Process That Includes A Human Workflow

This blog is currently addressing business processes, human workflows, etc. However, at the very bottom of this page appears my bibliography [partial] with prior articles on topics like cost benefit analysis, six sigma, service level agreements, etc

To reconcile these two, sometimes opposed approaches to system design, I recommend the following talk (in a one-hour video) by John Seddon, an occupational psychologist. Just click on the image below to watch his January 03, 2010 presentation.



In the course of his talk, Seddon refers to the 2008 Wiley book



Customer service, often a human task, they assert, is only needed when an organization does something wrong -- eliminating the need for service is the best way to satisfy customers. To be successful, organizations need to treat service as a data point of dysfunction and figure what they need to do to eliminate the demand.

You decide!

An Update on the BPEL4People & WS-Human Task Standards

The BPEL specification focuses on business processes, the activities of which are assumed to be interactions with Web services with no additional prerequisite behavior. But the spectrum of activities that make up general purpose business processes is much broader. People often participate in the execution of business processes introducing new aspects, such as human interaction patterns. Workflow tools already cater for the orchestration of user interactions.

User interactions range from simple scenarios, such as manual approval, to complex scenarios where data is entered by the user. Imagine a bank’s personal loan process. This process is made available on the internet site of the bank using a web interface. Customers can use this interface to enter the data for their loan approval request and to start the approval process. The process performs some checks, and eventually informs the customer whether his or her personal loan request has been approved or rejected. Processing is often automatic and does not require any human involvement. However, there are cases that require bank staff to be involved. An example of such a case is if the online check of a customer’s creditworthiness returns an ambiguous result. In this case, instead of declining the request automatically, a bank clerk could check the request and determine whether to approve or decline it. Another example would be if a request exceeds the amount of money that can be approved automatically. In this case, a manual approval step is required, in which a member of the “approvers” group either approves or declines the request.

User interactions in business processes are not limited to approval steps. They also may involve data. An example of a user interaction that involves data is when an e-mail from an employer is manually attached to the process instance, or when the summary of an interview with an applicant is keyed into the process via a simple form or custom-built application.

To support a broad range of scenarios that involve people within business processes, a BPEL extension is required.

BPEL4People is defined in a way that it is layered on top of the BPEL language so that its features can be composed with the BPEL core features whenever needed. We envisage that additional BPEL extensions may be introduced which may use the BPEL4People extension introduced here.

BPEL4People is the WS-BPEL Extension for People as proposed in a joint white paper by IBM and SAP in July 2005.

In June 2007, Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP published the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications as a follow-up to the whitepaper, describing how human interaction in BPEL processes can be performed.

The OASIS WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Tecnical Committee is working on standardizing the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications.

Click here for a very engaging podcast that describes the inner workings of Technical Committee’s (something you usually don’t hear much about), describes the work the OASIS TC has recently accomplished and articulates the grand vision for business process management (BPM) and workflow that the committee has been working on.

I strongly encourage you to listen to this podcast. You’ll hear how some the of most important thought-leaders in the IT world, including IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, TIBCO and Active Endpoints are discussing BPEL and BPEL4People.

SOA, Web Services, BPEL, Human Workflow, User Interaction and Healthcare Systems

Lack of integration among legacy healthcare systems and applications means a continued reliance on manual processes that can introduce high risk errors into critical medical data. And isolated systems can compromise a provider's ability to follow an individual patient's care seamlessly from intake to treatment to aftercare.

While healthcare providers recognize that integration can help them achieve better service levels, many have been reluctant to proceed because of the critical nature of healthcare systems. But the approach to integration need not be a radical one of system rip and replace, nor does it have to precede through the development of system-by-system integration solutions.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a standards-based approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can rapidly respond to new organizational challenges and deliver new dynamic applications. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying IT architecture and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.

To derive a new value from existing services and go beyond simple point-to-point integration, you will need to combine and orchestrate these services in a business process. You will want to connect them in a coordinated manner, for example, have the result(s) from one service be the input to another service and have branching logic based on the outcome. Of course, you can use Java, C#, or another programming environment to call the services and manage the processes and data, but there is an easier, declarative way.

BPEL

An important standard in the SOA world is BPEL, or Business Process Execution Language, which serves as the glue to tie SOA-based services (Web services) together into business processes -- at least the portions that can be automated. The resulting BPEL process can itself be exposed as a Web service, and therefore, be included in other business processes.

The BPEL standard says nothing about how people interact with it, but BPEL in the Oracle Inc. BPEL Process Manager (to be discussed in my next post) includes a Human Workflow component (shown in the figure below) that provides support for human interaction with processes.



BPEL and User Interaction

I began an introduction to BPEL and human workflow towards the bottom of my December 14 post. Click here for a good deal more on this topic.

Humans can be involved in business processes as a special kind of implementation of an activity. To facilitate this, a new BPEL activity type called human task is required. From the point of view of the BPEL business process, a human task is a basic activity, which is not implemented by a piece of software, but realized by an action performed by a human being. In the drag-and-drop design pallet shown in the figure above, the actor of a human activity can be introduced into a BPEL process by using your mouse. A human activity can be associated with different groups of people, one for each generic human role.

People dealing with business processes do so by using a user interface. When human activities are used, the input data and output data must be rendered in a way that the user can interpret. More on this in upcoming posts.

Human resolution or disambiguation -- Integrating human workflow in BPEL processes -- Errors in statistical matching of attributes to an individual

To locate health records, statistical matching attempts to string together enough identifying information about an individual to substitute for a unique personal identifier. It involves matching attributes, such as last name, first name, birth date, address or zip code, and gender, and it may use medical-record numbers and all or part of the Social Security number.

The problem with personal attribute keys such as name and address is that they are usually not unique to the individual, change over time, and are often entered into different systems in different formats. And data-entry errors, such as misspellings, add to the difficulties with this type of key. Repeated collection, distribution, storage, and use of these data also represent an important identity-theft risk.

Statistical matching can attempt to correct for some of these changes and errors: The most straightforward process is to tag all of the near matches for human resolution, or disambiguation. Such disambiguation imposes significant costs and operational inefficiencies, particularly if the physician must resolve the ambiguities. Advanced approaches “score” matches on “closeness” to the input set. Those with a high score may be accepted as a match. However, all such efforts are subject to the probabilistic errors inherent in statistical matching systems.

As discussed in earlier posts, there are two types of errors - false positives, in which two different persons’ records are declared to be a match, which can lead to such errors as the wrong patient’s health data being obtained; and false negatives, in which two records for the same person are thought to relate to different people, leading to such consequences as some of the patient’s data being excluded. Both of these errors can lead to serious medical errors, waste (e.g., repeats of tests or the wrong tests), and considerable deviation from the promises of continuity and quality of care postulated for a connected digital health care system.

Disambiguation is a process through which multiple potential identification matches are further parsed until the patient can be matched with his or her data with sufficient certainty to allow for the delivery of a health service with reasonable confidence. The complexity of disambiguation varies according to factors such as the number of potential matches and the type of information available for further analyses. When sufficient digital data are not available to further differentiate potential matches, automated disambiguation may not be possible and may require human involvement. This last case will be the focus of the rest of this post and my next post.

Disambiguation entails implementing significant new workflows and may require substantial time and resources. When human involvement is required, many of the potential benefits of automation are lost. For example, at the point of care, disambiguation is often done by asking the patient further questions regarding personal characteristics and/or health care history. In some situation, disambiguation may not be possible, as when the patient is not present and information needed to further facilitate matching may not be accessible.

I will show how one vendor, Oracle, implements human tasks that can provide workflows such as those identified above. However, these Oracle services can be accessed by applications created with development tools from other vendors (my discussion will use Microsoft Visual Studio).

Introduction to BPEL and Human Workflow

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Apropos of this discussion, business processes often require human interactions as well.

User Interaction in Business Processes

BPEL business processes are defined as collections of activities that invoke services. BPEL doesn't make a distinction between services provided by applications and other interactions, such as human interactions. And that's important since real-world business processes often integrate not only systems and services but also users. User interactions in business processes can be simple, such as approving certain tasks or decisions, or complex, such as delegation, renewal, escalation, nomination, or chained execution . . . and matching an ID with an individual.

Task approval is the simplest and probably the most common user interaction. In a business process for opening a new account, a user interaction might be required to decide whether the user is allowed to open the account. If the situation is more complex, a business process might require several users to make approvals, either in sequence or in parallel. In sequential scenarios, the next user often wants to see the decision made by the previous user. Sometimes, particularly in parallel user interactions, users aren't allowed to see the other users' decisions. This improves the decision potential. Sometimes one user doesn't even know which other users are involved - or whether any other users are involved at all.

A common scenario for involving more than one user is workflow with escalation. Escalation is typically used in situations where an activity doesn't fulfill a time constraint. In such a case, a notification is sent to one or more users. Escalations can be chained, going first to the first-line employees and advancing to senior staff if the activity isn't fulfilled.

Sometimes it's difficult or impossible to define in advance which user should perform an interaction. In this case, a supervisor might manually nominate the task to other employees; the nomination can also be made by a group of users or by a decision-support system.

In other scenarios, a business process may require a single user to perform several steps that can be defined in advance or during the execution of the process instance. Even more complex processes might require that one workflow is continued with another workflow.

User interactions aren't limited to approvals; they can also include data entries or process management issues, such as process initiation, suspension, and exception management. This is particularly true in long-running business processes, where, for example, user exception handling can prevent costly process termination and related compensation for those activities that have already been successfully completed.

As a best practice for human workflows, it's usually not wise to associate human interactions directly with specific users; it's better to connect tasks to roles and then associate those roles with individual users. This gives business processes greater flexibility, letting any user with a certain role interact with the process and enabling changes to users and roles to be made dynamically.

BPEL and User Interaction

So far we've seen that user interaction in business processes can get quite complex. Several vendors today have created workflow services that leverage the rich BPEL support for asynchronous services. In this fashion, people and manual tasks become just another asynchronous service from the perspective of the orchestrating process and the BPEL processes stay 100% standard.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the specifics of how you might implement a BPEL process that includes human workflow/tasks for disambiguation using tools such as Oracles JDeveloper and Microsoft Visual Studio. The next two figures are meant to give you a preview of that discussion.

{ click the figures for a larger view }


Click here for more on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Click here for more on Oracle BPEL and Human Workflow

Technical Interoperability of Disparate Systems - An Electronic Health Record (EHR)-Centric System Implemented with a Service-Oriented Architecture

The independent organizations (a.k.a. silos) shown in Figure 1 typically implement their business processes on different computer systems (Unix, Windows, mainframes), on different platforms (J2EE, .NET) and with different vocabularies. Yet, they all need to communicate in a way that serves, in this case, a trauma victim at the time of his or her emergency, researchers who will later study cohorts of this trauma victim, and sundry others (most of whom are not shown in the simplified model).

This post will discuss an Electronic Health Record (EHR)-centric system implemented with a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) -- the business industry’s de facto standard for interoperability. The functions of this system are data collection, management and distribution for both the immediate situation and long term health care experiences.

I’ll address some of the challenges (and opportunities) of technical interoperability, holding off ‘til later posts any discussion of semantic interoperability.

Note: This rather lengthy post is not and is not meant to be a palimpsest on SOA. But, I have included a number of references (links to references) for anyone looking for a more detailed account of this topic.

Figure 1

Figure 2 shows a traditional implementation of the system shown in the use case drawn in Figure 1. When a change -- virtually any change -- is made in one part of this interconnected system, the overall system usually stops working, until system-wide adjustments are made. In short, the figure below shows a system that’s “hard wired.”

Note: For simplicity, these figures and this discussion omit a number of real-world details: for example, the voice communication often employed by police and EMS teams.

Figure 2

To remedy this problem, a new architecture, that of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), was devised. An SOA implementation of the system shown in the use case is outlined in Figure 3. At first glance, the SOA-based system might seem more complicated than the system shown in Figure 2. But, as the following discussion will attempt to show, it isn’t.

Figure 3

Note: The major part of this post will be based on a Web services implementation of SOA. However, before concluding this post, I’ll address the oft-heard view that SOA is now “dead.” SOA is indeed alive and kicking in many organizations.

The system in Figure 2, if fleshed out, would move toward becoming the fully connected system shown below (in practice, very few systems are fully connected). In such a system of computer applications, when one node is changed, all other nodes that connect to it would need a new interface to the changed node.

As shown, in a fully connected network with n nodes, there are n x (n-1) / 2 direct paths. That means 15 connections for 6 nodes, 45 connections for 10 nodes, etc.

In contrast, each node in the system in Figure 3 has only one connection – that to a bus, as represented in the figure below.



Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA relies on services exposing their functionality via interfaces that other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services.

This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro (classes) level. It can also simplify interconnection to – and usage of – existing IT (legacy) assets.

Designers can implement SOA using a wide range of technologies, including SOAP, REST, DCOM, CORBA, or Web Services. (I gave a brief overview of DCOM, CORBA and Web Services in my June 16 post and will discuss REST below.) The key is independent services with defined interfaces that can be called to perform their tasks in a standard way, without a service having foreknowledge of the calling application, and without the application having or needing knowledge of how the service actually performs its tasks.

Albeit in the distant past, I’ve used the Oracle SOA Suite to federate a unified system out of the disparate systems shown in the figures.

This suite, which includes JDeveloper, a robust Java IDE, is by no means the only solution; there are others, both proprietary and open source! For example,

Proprietary: http://i.zdnet.com/whitepapers/cape_clear_Principles_of_BPEL.pdf

Open source: http://orchestra.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/

However, the Oracle SOA Suite is a complete set of service infrastructure components for creating, deploying, and managing services. It enables services to be created, managed, and orchestrated into composite applications and business processes. Additionally, you can adopt it incrementally on a project by project basis and still benefit from the common security, management, deployment architecture, and development tools that you get out of the box.

This Suite is a standards-based technology suite that consists of the following:

* Oracle BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate services into business processes
* ESB to connect existing IT systems and business partners as a set of services
* Oracle Business Rules for dynamic decisions at run time that can be managed by business users or business analysts
* Oracle Application Server Integration Business Activity Monitoring to monitor services and disparate events and provide real-time visibility into the state of the enterprise, business processes, people, and systems.
* Oracle Web Services Manager to secure and manage authentication, authorization, and encryption policies on services that is separate from your service logic
* UDDI registry to discover and manage the life cycle of Web services.
* Oracle Application Server that provides a complete Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environment for your J2EE applications.

For an overview of the soon-to-be-released Version 11, see

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/bpel/techpreview/2008-05-01-whats-new-in-oracle-soa-suite-tp4.pdf

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services. BPEL enables organizations to automate their business processes by orchestrating services (thus enabling developers to build end-to-end business processes spanning applications, systems, and people in a standard way). Existing functionality is exposed as services. New applications are composed using services. Services are reused across different applications. Services everywhere! For an account of Orchestration versus Choreography, see

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/matjaz_bpel1.html

BPEL has emerged as the standard for process orchestration enabling you to build end-to-end business processes spanning applications, systems, and people in a standard way.

In the next figure, I show two pallets of drag-and-drop components available in version 10.3 of the SOA Suite for the development of a BPEL process. Version 11 will be availability shortly.

Introduction to the JDeveloper BPEL Designer

http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B31017_01/core.1013/b28938/design.htm#CHDIJCGH

Enterprise Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architectural pattern, not a software product. Different software products can form an ESB. In some cases, companies use multiple products in different areas, leveraging specific functionality to meet their unique requirements. These different products can be federated together as the realization of the ESB pattern.

In the next figure, I show two pallets of drag-and-drop components available in version 10.3 of the SOA Suite for the development of an ESB. As I mentioned earlier, Version 11 will be availability shortly.

Introduction to the JDeveloper ESB Designer

http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B31017_01/core.1013/b28938/design.htm#CHDIBCCC

Figure 3 introduced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Rules to the architecture

Business Activity Monitoring – BAM satisfies a growing need to enable health care executives, and more specifically operations managers, to improve their decision-making processes by first getting a real time view of the business events occurring in their enterprise, and second using the derived intelligence to analyze and improve the efficiency of their business processes.

Understanding Business Activity Monitoring in Oracle SOA Suite
http://www.packtpub.com/article/business-activity-monitoring-in-oracle-soa-suite

Business Rules – Business Rules is one of the newer technologies (typically run from an application server) and is designed to make applications more agile. A business analyst can change business policies expressed as rules quickly and safely with little or no assistance from a programmer

Using Business Rules to Define Decision Points in Oracle SOA Suite

Part 1. http://www.packtpub.com/article/business-rules-define-decision-points-oracle-soa-suite-part1

Part 2. http://www.packtpub.com/article/business-rules-define-decision-points-oracle-soa-suite-part2

For detailed coverage of the Oracle Service Bus, BPEL Process Manager, Web Service Manager, Rules, Human Workflow, and Business Activity Monitoring. See

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide
http://www.packtpub.com/developers-guide-for-oracle-soa-suite-10gr3/book

and

Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 – A Hands-On Tutorial
http://www.packtpub.com/getting-started-with-oracle-soa-suite-11g-r1/book

When designing an SOA solution, it's not always clear whether you should use a Web services BPEL process or an ESB mediation flow (or both).

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0803_fasbinder2/0803_fasbinder2.html

Building Event-Driven Architecture with an Enterprise Service Bus

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/jellema-esb.html

Software frameworks

You should keep in mind that interoperability issues between platforms can arise when switching from one protocol to another and one software framework to another. Some examples include SOAP, REST, the .Net Framework, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), and Java Messaging Service (JMS).

.Net Web services running over HTTP can be called in three different ways: HTTP GET operation, HTTP POST operation, and SOAP. The GET and POST operations are useful if you need to call a Web Service quickly and no SOAP client is readily available. You can use REST to perform GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE operations over the HTTP in a Perl script. In this script, you can specify SQL queries and simple message queues.

For a discussion of SOAP/REST in the .NET (Visual Studio 2008 SP1) ecosystem, see

http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/scottallen/archive/2008/08/11/visual-studio-sp1-and-the-metification-of-rest.aspx

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203052.aspx

Often, services within an organization’s firewall are REST-based, while 3rd party partners use a mix of SOAP and HTTPS protocols to access their public services. By using REST for internal services, organizations are avoiding some of the overhead that the WS-* standards introduce.

If the SOAP client is available, here's how to make a simple choice between REST and SOAP. If the application is resource-based, choose REST. If the application is activity-based, opt for SOAP. Under REST, a client might request that several operations be performed on a series of resources over the HTTP. For SOAP-based requests, only one invoke operation is needed for each activity-oriented service that a client might request be performed.

REST requests do not depend on WSDL as SOAP requests do. Yet, REST and SOAP can co-exist as requests from a composite Web service application to an external Web service.

When to use REST based web services?

http://oracled.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/when-to-use-rest-based-web-services/

When Web services are outside the control of the organization (as in the figures at the top of this post), you need to ensure that they can interoperate externally with one another with respect to shared semantics and contractual obligations. Semantic misunderstandings and contractual loopholes contribute to interoperability problems between external enterprise Web services. Future posts will focus on these aspects of interoperability.

For presentations that includes the pros and cons of different protocols (SOAP and HTTP) and software frameworks (.NET and J2EE), see

http://www.esri.com/events/devsummit/pdfs/keynote_chappell.pdf

and

http://www.esri.com/events/devsummit/sessions/keynote.html

The oft-heard view that SOA is now “dead”

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment -- at least for many organizations. SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. In many situations, however, SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits.

Yet, although SOA is understandably purported to be dead by many, the requirement for a service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.

Adopting SOA (i.e., application re-architecture) requires disruption to the status quo. SOA is not simply a matter of deploying new technology and building service interfaces to existing applications; it requires redesign of the application portfolio. And it requires a massive shift in the way IT operates. The small select group of organizations that has seen spectacular gains from SOA did so by treating it as an agent of transformation. In each of these success stories, SOA was just one aspect of the transformation effort. And here’s the secret to success: SOA needs to be part of something bigger. If it isn’t, then you need to ask yourself why you’ve been doing it.

The latest shiny new technology will not make things better. Incremental integration projects will not lead to significantly reduced costs and increased agility. If you want spectacular gains, then you need to make a spectacular commitment to change.

Note: As of 2008, increasing numbers of third-party software companies offer software services for a fee. In the future, SOA systems may consist of such third-party services combined with others created in-house.

More on this can be found in “WOA: Putting the Web Back in Web Services.”

http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_gall/2008/11/19/woa-putting-the-web-back-in-web-services/

Also, here’s a link to one of my earlier articles on SOA

“The Economic, Cultural and Governance Issues of SOA”

http://www.cioupdate.com/reports/article.php/11050_3652091_1/The-Economic-Cultural-and-Governance-Issues-of-SOA.htm

Interoperability of Disparate Systems ...

A system that includes new and old technologies -- partially represented by the use case diagram shown below -- will be the subject of upcoming posts. Interoperability -- technical and semantic -- using open, standard protocols will be my focus.



{double click for larger view}

For anyone not familiar with use case diagrams, here's a link to an easy-to-follow introduction to using them and another link to the Wikipedia entry for use case diagrams.

The discussion of technical interoperability will include, but not be limited to, whether to employ Web services with BPEL or ESB (or both) and business activity monitoring (BAM) tools.

The discussion of semantic interoperability will include, but not be limited to, whether to employ HL7 version 3 messages or CDA documents (or both).

Other topics such as service level agreements (SLA), key performance indicators (KPI), telemetry, and telemedicine will be included.