EAI

Service-oriented architectures are emerging quickly as the commercial world's answer to a flexible, standards-based infrastructure. In the world of government IT, enterprise architecture through enterprise integration is its equivalent.

But, there are important considerations that can significantly improve implementation speed, ROI, and costs associated with creating a more dynamic, standards-based infrastructure. This article explores what it takes for organizations in the public sector to build an effective enterprise architecture and practical recommendations for a successful, and cost-effective implementation.

To meet today's demands and plan for those of tomorrow, IT organizations in both the commercial and public sectors must establish an architecture that is both flexible and standards-based. The ability to proactively manage the enterprise computing architecture is the chief goal of information technology departments within any government organization. In fact, an organization's ultimate success may hinge on its ability to rapidly respond to changing business strategies, regulations, and technologies.

Today, that translates into an architecture that provides the means to automate processes between existing legacy applications and newer enterprise applications, and one that can support the exchange of data between multiple applications in real, or close to real, time. It also means an architecture that provides the basis to easily add or plug in new applications, that supports widely accepted industry standards, and that provides the capability to monitor and measure performance.

The challenge, of course, for government organizations and Fortune 500 companies alike, is in getting there. It is a significant undertaking, fraught with potential roadblocks, but there are products and technologies available today to help organizations overcome these obstacles and achieve the transformation. And the payoffs are worth it.

With a modern, performance-based enterprise architecture, organizations will achieve significant outcomes from their investments. The first is an enterprise with a reengineered set of business processes that can be monitored, measured, and centrally tracked in real time, achieved using best practices like the Supply Chain Operational Reference model (SCOR). The second is a framework that transcends technology, allowing for data standards as they evolve. The third is an aggressive portfolio management plan that integrates legacy systems with modernization efforts, and in the process eliminates unnecessary and redundant systems. Finally, organizations will be able to put into place a set of metrics to measure, track, refine, and ultimately ensure the success of the enterprise.

Making the Leap To Service-Oriented Architecture
The first step in achieving a modern architecture involves creating a strategic vision - determining exactly where the enterprise needs to be in the long term. The vision should only consider the "Future Enterprise," and not be influenced or limited by the "As Is Enterprise." A strategic vision will serve as the basis for the road map that will chart and transform the current architecture to the desired state.

For many organizations, that strategic vision will mean deploying a service-oriented architecture (SOA). At its core, an SOA consists of a collection of services on a network that communicate with one another. Rather than serve one application or function, those services perform a business process, which can be utilized by multiple applications. For example, when a credit card authorization application is developed as a service rather than built directly into a program, it can be used or consumed by multiple applications. This highlights obvious advantages for IT departments since applications can be reused and are not hard-coded.

The benefits of migrating to an SOA are many. The most significant, particularly with large government organizations that have grown up over the years with stovepipe applications, is the ability to economically integrate systems. Legacy systems need not be ripped out and replaced; they can be linked and modernized using a wide range of standard protocols, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Existing business processes can then be leveraged as services by multiple applications - using a service only requires knowing its interface and name.

With an SOA, infrastructure development and deployment become more consistent across the enterprise. Newly developed components and applications purchased from vendors can be integrated easily and in turn deployed as services. New initiatives are able to leverage existing services and components kept in Web services libraries, greatly reducing the time-to-market and cost of development. Reusing tried and tested components also reduces the risk and maintenance factors involved in introducing new applications into the environment.

Today's SOA-based products make the once overwhelming task of integrating enterprise systems now seem rather tame. A key consideration for selecting an SOA architecture is a flexible deployment environment - due to the diverse, heterogeneous nature of most IT organizations, it is highly advantageous to have the option of peer-to-peer deployment of SOA solutions.

Defining the Future - Beyond the "As-Is" State
The next step involves choosing the architectural framework. This is a critical phase; the goal is to achieve application and data interoperability across the enterprise that extends interoperability to include partners and suppliers through common data standards and processes. The Zackman Framework is the forefather of many of the current models of the architectural framework now deployed in the federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD). Within the DoD, the models in use are the DoDAF and an extended version called the DoDAF Plus. The DoDAF consists of an operational architecture, (OA), system architecture (SA), and technical architecture (TA). The DoDAF Plus extends the model to include a data architecture (DA), which focuses on ensuring data interoperability (see Figure 1).

Once the architectural framework has been selected to create the enterprise architecture, the next step is to capture the business processes currently in place so that they can be mapped and transformed to the strategic vision. This is the area where many enterprises fall short. If the right tools are not chosen to map and transform the processes to the desired enterprise architecture, the organization loses the benefits of creating the enterprise architecture in the first place and cannot achieve the expected return on investment.

The work begins by capturing the existing or "As Is" business processes. The selected solution should provide more than just the graphical representation of the flow of information among systems, organizations, and people; it should have the ability to execute the underlying code and deploy the business process within the same tool. It is essential that it include the following features:

• Ease of use: Nontechnical process owners, such as business users and operations staff, must be able to easily define and understand process flows.
• Complete process integration: Must be able to include automated tasks that span intra- and extra-enterprise operations, Web services, as well as steps performed by people.
• Agility: Offer the ability to dynamically modify and refine business processes in response to changing business requirements.

A primary goal of business process automation is, of course, to reduce the level of human involvement in a process. However, many processes require exceptions handling at some level. Those human workflow components need to be captured and incorporated into the overall business processes. There are solutions available today that include human workflow capabilities and ensure that processes can be graphically mapped, represented, and executed.

With a clear end-to-end picture of the system and human-related components involved in business processes, organizations can then easily and dynamically look for ways to drive operational efficiencies. Information can be tracked across people and departments, with an eye towards standardizing work methods and audit trails. In effect, process owners can point-and-click their way towards better, more cost-efficient operations and more easily duplicate best practices.

Monitor and Measure
It's no longer enough to cobble together several systems or let one or two applications reach into another's data. Today's highest value initiatives require end-to-end integration of complex enterprise processes, coupled with technologies that enable real-time insights into what's really happening in those processes.

To achieve true effectiveness in optimizing your operations, you need to be able to monitor and manage processes as they are being executed. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) allows organizations to define key performance indicators (KPIs) that are critical to the enterprise, along with the key metrics associated with each KPI. In conjunction with this, BAM allows you to monitor transactions in real time and to compare and analyze transactions against KPIs. These systems also have built-in intelligence to learn from past events and to predict and recommend solutions to future problems.

The Big Picture
There is a growing movement among government organizations to develop enterprise architectures that not only serve the needs of today, but are also positioned to respond to the rapidly changing needs of tomorrow. The thought of getting there seems overwhelming and in the past has been an extremely expensive and difficult undertaking. However, with SOA-based integration products, almost every aspect of the modernization process has been addressed by technologies and services that make the task much more realistic and economical.

• Business process management solutions simplify the process of mapping the "As Is" enterprise architecture against the desired or "To Be" architecture. Processes can be graphically depicted, making it easier for business owners to streamline operations and find efficiencies.
• Sophisticated enterprise integration platforms facilitate the implementation of service-oriented architectures, providing the means to integrate legacy systems with newer applications, and to implement businesses processes as services, which may be accessed and utilized by multiple applications.
• Off-the-shelf adapters and brokers, combined with widely accepted standards, simplify the process of exchanging data between disparate systems.
• Business activity monitoring solutions, which include balanced scorecards and dashboards, complete the picture, providing managers with the means to monitor and measure processes, and to ultimately predict and resolve problems before they have a chance to negatively impact the bottom line.

By taking a holistic approach towards achieving a modernized enterprise architecture and utilizing the technologies and services available today, government organizations and businesses alike can speed the time to achieving tangible results. They will be able to extend data interoperability across the enterprise, eliminate redundant systems, improve data quality, and measure processes against business-oriented goals.

Most importantly, a foundation will be in place to automate and incorporate a wide range of processes to accommodate the needs of today and tomorrow.