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Abstract
In a rapidly changing business environment, keeping up with market and customer demand is crucial to survival. The infrastructure and applications that are at the heart of the business must be readily adaptable to meet those changing demands. With that in mind, this IBM Redbooks publication focuses on two Self Service application patterns, Self Service::Decomposition and Self Service::Agent, and looks at how these patterns can introduce business agility into an enterprise.
The Decomposition application pattern is instantiated with the process choreographer feature of WebSphere® Business Integration Server Foundation and features BPEL4WS technology.
Using process choreography allows us to define business processes as a set of activities executed in a particular sequence to achieve a business goal. Using process choreography ensures that business applications consist of flexible and adaptable elements allowing the application to change rapidly to meet business demands. As business processes change, new elements of the process can be inserted, and old elements rearranged or deleted. The implementation of each element in the process is still managed by the owning business units.
Integrating the use of business rule beans into the process or back-end applications allows rapid change to meet business requirements. Business rule beans externalize business elements that can be changed dynamically. These rules are defined and changed by business people, not programmers.
Moving into the Agent pattern, we enhance the capability of the business process and back-end applications to access business data. With the addition of an operational data store (ODS) we greatly improve the ability of applications to retrieve relevant business data quickly. Data from disparate legacy systems is transformed into a common format and gathered in the ODS for use by the business processes. The ODS contains only a subset of the legacy data, providing a streamlined, consistent, and current view of the business. The ODS can be read-only, or can allow data to be modified, in which case it is synchronized in near real-time with the legacy data. Integrating data at the ODS level versus changing back-end legacy systems provides additional business flexibility that is especially apparent during mergers and acquisitions.
Table of contents
Part 1. Patterns for e-business
Chapter 1. Patterns for e-business
Chapter 2. Self-service business pattern
Chapter 3. Runtime patterns and product mappings
Part 2. Guidelines
Chapter 4. Technology options
Chapter 5. Designing business processes
Part 3. Scenarios
Chapter 6. Building business processes with WebSphere Studio
Chapter 7. Business scenario overview
Chapter 8. Decomposition application pattern
Chapter 9. Decomposition application pattern with human interaction
Chapter 10. Agent application pattern
Part 4. Appendixes
Appendix A. Setting up and installing the scenarios
Appendix B. Business rule beans
Appendix C. Additional material