Why a Business Architecture?

The main goal of a Business Architecture is to enable the business to improve customer service quality through a better transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. The market environment changes more rapidly and the use of technology by customers dramatically influences how a business can operate. Financial services calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content change already weekly rather than monthly.

However, if a business architecture has to be modelled, encoded and assembled by using a large number of tools and software components it cannot provide the benefits. Today’s heavily fragmented and hardcoding-integrated IT systems (including SOA) are too rigid to enable rapidly changing business environments. Most IT departments do not focus on adaptability and innovation because they have been requested to focus on lowering cost and system stability. Therefore, six month rollout cycles are the norm with three month being the exception. Business users expectations of stability and executive demands for lower cost are incompatible with the ability to achieve a flexble and adaptive, competitive IT infrastructure. Efficiency is still the main IT goal, with effectiveness a far-off second and agility being no more than an overused buzzword.

Combine this with the misconception that running a business can be pre-planned and therefore encoded into processes and rules, with decisions being taken by predictive analysis based on historical (or better outdated?) business data. I propose that good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. After billions of IT investments neither process management nor business intelligence have delivered the promised wonderland of the automated enterprise that the board can run remotely from the beach. Why?

Neither BPM nor BI consider the human side of running a business and therefore fail to produce a nimble, agile organization. Based on unproven management theories and over-optimistic information technology benefit claims a huge IT bureaucracy is now necessary to manage a complex technology stack. Control and use of the technology stack is only feasable through outsourcing partners and the necessary complex contracts reduce corporate agility even more. Billions are spent by the IT monopolists for marketing to sell an illusion of the IT-controlled business that does not exist and is not achievable by the proposed complex means.

The above situation was the reason for ISIS Papyrus to develop a new IT platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptible Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department.

Agility AND innovation happen on the people level. BPM and SixSigma trash out the people empowerment slogan but fail to deliver because in neither approach people are given the freedom to do things as they see fit as long as the goals are achieved. Enterprise 2.0 is a countermovement to the bureaucratic IT-Governance approach, but if it is simply putting Web 2.0 behind the firewall without giving the user access to plausible business data entities there is not such thing as empowerment.

William of Ockham wrote in Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate: “The explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible and not invent further entities to explain a theory.” He was a friar and felt that the one entity of God would explain everything. Bertrand Russel translated it to: “The simplest explanation is usually the best.” Translated further to IT means that coded software systems or process solutions that require substantial resources to be model a business and even more to then adapt it to changing needs make things more complex than necessary. Flexibility AND adaptability by the user – while ensuring transparency and maintainability – are the key capabilities of modern systems. SixSigma adds a lot of bureaucratic complexity that is certainly not in line with Occam’s Razor. Let’s simplify …

A detailed description of Business Architecture features of the Papyrus Platform you will on my Papyrus Architecture blog.

SOA and WS-BPEL: Composing Service-Oriented Architecture Solutions with PHP and Open-Source ActiveBPEL

Product Description

Composing Service-Oriented Architecture Solutions with PHP and Open-Source ActiveBPEL

• Build Web Services with PHP
• Combine PHP Web Services into orchestrations with WS-BPEL
• Use better WS-BPEL to enable parallel processing and asynchronous communication
• Simplify WS-BPEL development with free graphical tool ActiveBPEL Designer

In Detail

When utilized within a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services are part of a business process determining the logical order of service activities – logical units of work performed by one or more services. Today, the most popular tool for organizing service activities into business processes is Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), a language defining an execution format for business processes operating on Web Services. While it is not a trivial task to define a business process definition with WS-BPEL from scratch, using a graphical WS-BPEL tool can significantly simplify this process.

Examples and practice are much more valuable than theory when it comes to building applications using specific development tools. Unlike many other books on SOA in the market, this book is not focused on architecture. Instead, through numerous examples, it discusses practical aspects of SOA and WS-BPEL development, showing you how to apply architecture in practice with the help of PHP, ActiveBPEL open-source engine, and ActiveBPEL Designer – powerful development tools available for free.

What you will learn from this book?

• Install and configure the software components required to build PHP Web Services and then combine them into WS-BPEL solutions
• Use PHP as the underlying technology for creating building blocks for SOAs
• Build data-centric services based on MySQL or Oracle Database XE
• Secure services built with PHP SOAP extension
• Combine fine-grained services built with PHP into coarse-grained ones with WS-BPEL
• Deploy WS-BPEL process services to ActiveBPEL open-source engine
• Simplify WS-BPEL development with ActiveBPEL Designer
• Implement asynchronous interactions between WS-BPEL processes

Approach

With the help of many examples, the book explains how to build Web Services with PHP, combine them into SOAs with WS-BPEL, and then deploy composite WS-BPEL-based solutions to the ActiveBPEL engine. The examples in this book are presented in a way that anyone can understand and apply.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for anyone who wants to start building SOA applications using powerful tools available free of charge. It also will be useful for PHP developers willing to move towards Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Readers need only a basic knowledge of SOA, BPEL, and Web Services; even a total beginner will be able to follow the examples, provided the required software components are installed on his or her computer. More experienced readers might use this book as a reference, focusing only on the chapters of interest.

SOA and WS-BPEL: Composing Service-Oriented Architecture Solutions with PHP and Open-Source ActiveBPEL