CBDI Forum CBDI Web Services Roadmap. Guiding the transition to Web Services and SOA
 
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Web Services Roadmap for the On Demand Business cont'd

Web Services Roadmap

Enterprises will not transition to on demand business overnight. IBM's enterprise customers need an evolutionary architecture that will get them there in stages, and address some more immediate problems along the way.

We see the roadmap consisting of two parallel but entwined tracks. Ideally, the provision of an on demand operating environment should to a large extent precede the transformation to on demand business Processes. Having said that, nothing stops new Web Services and business processes being designed with on demand business in mind but implemented in today's operating environment. Circumstances will often dictate this. The key is to design and implement them in such a way that moving them to an on demand operating environment at a later stage is as painless as possible. As such, the use of Web Services and adoption of SOA principles will be essential. In the following section we asses these stages according to the CBDI Web Services Maturity Model.1

Early Learning Phase

Organizations will usually commence with tactical, ad-hoc use of Web Services to meet immediate internal and external requirements. These would not typically be implemented today as part of a concerted effort to put a foundation in place for the on demand business.

Nevertheless, some useful steps can be taken. For example, exposing external services can make an organization look more responsive particularly where it automates what was previously a manual task for the service consumer.

At this stage partnering with IBM in the jStart program might be the most appropriate way to not only address some immediate Web Service needs, but to ensure best practices are adopted and that the correct first steps towards on demand are made. We would also recommend starting to get developers involved as soon as possible in the IBM Speed Start for Web Services training and guidance program.

Integration Phase

In terms of the immediate future, the integration state is probably the most important. At this stage, most activity will revolve around optimising existing business processes where improving integration and accessibility will be the key drivers. However, to meet these and other goals of the on demand business it is essential that Business Services have been developed with the longer term in mind. Business Services need to be properly abstracted away from current implementations.

During the Integration phase, IS should be laying the groundwork for on demand. Steps include

  1. Start implementing an enterprise wide Web Service infrastructure. Upgrade application servers, middleware to support Web Services. Install Web Service Management capabilities to manage SLA. Provide an internal UDDI registry.

  2. Expose Web Services from existing applications. Owners of applications should convert their existing interfaces to Web Services. From a technology perspective, this is often a straightforward usage of the platform or packaged application vendors latest Web Service aware releases of their products on which the existing apps are based. Web Services can then be used as an open-standards approach to EAI in the continuing effort to optimise internal processes.

  3. Delivering Web Services based on SOA Principles. Apply Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles in development and service design. For example, carefully abstracting the Service away from current implementation(s).

  4. Implement a Business Service Bus approach. The Business Service Bus exposes Web Services that reflect meaningful business concepts to service consumers. The 'bus' groups together related Web Services that will share common elements of specification and taxonomy in a specific business domain

Adoption of SOA and use of the Business Service Bus will be a core here as these that will deliver the long term flexibility that the on demand business needs. Simply exposing Web Services directly off existing systems can be suboptimal as they can reflect too closely the existing implementation, and are more often affected by changes to that. Additionally, existing APIs are often of the wrong granularity, particularly for external use, and Web Services exposed in this way can leave too much work for the service consumer (both internal and external) to aggregate and refine them into something useful.

This does not imply that Web Services should not be exposed from existing services, rather that steps 3 and 4 above be used to create a two layers architecture that separates what we term implementation based Web Services from the more meaningful Business Services that are used by the Service consumer. Benefits of this approach include

  • Truly hides the implementation from the service consumer
  • Enables on demand aggregation and composition of new Business Services from implementation based services
  • Provides transition path to the on demand Operating Environment, enabling Service implementations to be outsourced and dynamically switched with a minimum of impact on the consumer

IBM provides a number of technologies, primarily as part of the alphaworks program listed above that facilitate this approach, including the WS Invocation Framework and WS Gateway, both of which are contained in their Web Services Bus. Together these (with other IBM middleware) enable the delivery of implementation based Web Services and the mechanism to aggregate them into, and manage them as, Business Services.

IS should also be re-engineering itself at this in preparation for the re-engineering of the business. There is little point in trying to deliver an on demand business, whilst IS still has long lead times. This does not just mean putting the on demand Operating Environment in place. IS needs to consider applying on demand principles to,

  • The way in which systems and their components are analysed, designed, assembled and built
  • The availability of human resources, and appropriate skills
  • Willingness to use external Service Providers, Hosts and various intermediaries, both as sources of Web Services, and to enable the delivery of Web Services

Re-engineering Phase

The Integration Phase should see the Web Service infrastructure in place, well formed Business Services, and existing business processes optimised. At that stage, BPO will primarily be the replacement of existing interfaces (human or machine) with Web Services to deliver STP. However, often the business process itself will not have changed much

Though it might not be a popular term, some Business Process Reengineering is now inevitable. Similarly, it is at this stage that the IS department should be "eating its own dog food". That is, if on demand is good enough for the business, it should be good enough for IS and it should start widely using the on demand operating environment. For example

  • At this stage the location of data and computing resource should not matter, providing adequate security and SLA is in place. This does not just mean that data is stored off site, but that data is retrieved from the owner on demand as needs require rather than replicated into the organizations own database.
  • Business Processes will be operated in a more federated and parallel approach, rather than the sequential supply chain approach of today. Events will trigger multiple business activities across the business process ecosystem.
  • Fine grained Business Process outsourcing will be possible - i.e. outsourcing the execution of certain individual steps, not the whole process, to get availability of appropriate resources on demand. Web Services will ensure these processes appear seamless regardless of the location of execution of each step.

We expect that key emerging Web Service technologies that IBM is promoting will be adopted at this stage to enable these activities. For example

  • Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) - Provides a more dynamic approach to implementing business processes. Process steps can execute wherever there is an appropriate engine.
  • Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) - mechanism for managing SLA across distributed Services

Maturity Phase

One hesitates to write and comment about maturity because it is high probability that by the time we ever reach the mature state, new concepts will have superseded what we are working with today. However at this stage services are ubiquitous and the on demand business is a reality. Federated services collaborate and create complex products with individual services provided from potentially many providers. The capability offered by Web Services to the mature on demand business is illustrated in Table 3.

On Demand Business
Web Services Status
Real Time Enterprise All core business processes are offered as Web Services with real time execution and currency of data;
Straight Through Processing All core business services have been reengineered to minimize intervention, but also to establish comprehensive business monitoring and measurement controls and highlight exceptional behavior
Just In Time A complete inventory exists of core business services that allows existing processes to be altered and new products, processes and channels to be introduced with minimum time and cost.
Business Process Optimization Web Services automate process flows eliminating wasteful self-service and other manual activity including external process steps.
Supply Chain Optimization Accurate and timely data is retrieved on demand from owners in the supply chain via Web Services rather than replicated across it. Shared, collaborative Services enable more parallel activity in processes rather than sequential.

Table 3 - Web Services for the Mature On Demand Business

Timeline

During 2003, we expect most users to remain in the Early Learning phase. Important preparation for the Integration Phase should also commence in terms of training and infrastructure upgrades.

Though external Web Services will be commonplace during the Early Learning and Integration phases, the prime focus at this point will be on enabling on demand business processes and Operating Environment from an internal perspective. Externalisation of these will not happen widely until the Reengineering phase.

Figure 2 - Adoption Timeline

Finally, let's ask if the challenges outlined earlier will be addressed.

•  Can they solve EAI and on demand business requirements in one go? Yes. Both EAI and on demand business can be addressed by Web Services. Addressing current EAI via Web Services provides a better transition path towards on demand business
•  Is on demand business going to require another different technology solution? No. EAI, B2B and distributed computing needs can all be addressed via Web Services and provide a common infrastructure to support on demand business
•  Can existing assets be reused yet again? In the Integration Phase yes. Much of the existing infrastructure has already been Web Service enabled to support this. Leading package vendors have enabled their applications too. However, the modus operandi of existing application may not be optimal for the Reengineering Phase.
•  Will on demand business require yet another layer of software infrastructure to be delivered onto every platform? Not really. Much of the existing software infrastructure will need to be upgraded to the latest versions to support Web Services, but a new additional layer shouldn't be required.
•  Are the skills required difficult to acquire? Is the learning curve to get developers up to best practices steep? On the whole no. The technology of Web Services will be largely transparent to developers. However Service analysis and design will require some rethinking. Best practices encapsulated in templates and frameworks will help considerably.

Summary

IBM provides a comprehensive set of Web Service enabled products and service offerings that enable their customers to implement an on demand business. Importantly, IBM is making sure that existing customers can (once again) take existing core technology investments forward via Web Service support for technologies such as CICS, MQSeries, and DB2.

Though the vision isn't necessarily completely new, we are impressed by the depth and breadth of the research that IBM is putting into making what is essentially the next generation of IT a reality. On demand pulls together many threads that IBM is at the leading edge of, such as Web Services, Pervasive, Autonomic and Grid Computing. However, individually these are technology centric messages and consolidating them in an on demand business message that demonstrates greater value by them working together to solve business problems should be clearly more attractive to the business user. Besides the obvious benefits of the business buzzwords as highlighted at the beginning, businesses are quite used to placing dependencies on external agents, i.e. in terms of creating supply chains and outsourcing non-core processes, and moving to JIT. As such they should be very receptive to and understanding of an on demand message

However, whilst IS organizations appreciate these benefits, and can also see the opportunities created by an on demand operating environment within IS itself, in our experience when discussing the use of external Web Services, they currently have greater concerns regarding making run-time dependencies on external agencies. This impacts the implementation of both on demand business processes and on demand operating environment.

But the transition to on demand business is not going to happen overnight. This is something that will take a number of years, though it will in our belief happen. As such, IS should not dismiss the externalization of on demand based on current market immaturity. Instead they should be commencing now to put place the necessary infrastructure and practices to support the transition to on demand business as it evolves. Partnering with IBM through initiatives such as jStart would be one recommended course of near term action.

By Lawrence Wilkes

Links

IBM Web Services Home http://www.ibm.com/webservices
IBM Developerworks http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices
IBM Alphaworks http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com
IBM jStart http://www-3.ibm.com/software/ebusiness/jstart/
IBM E-Business Patterns http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/patterns/
IBM Speed Start http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/ws-speed-start/
IBM On Demand Operating Environment http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info/openenvironment/

References

  1. http://www.cbdiforum.com/secure/interact/2003-05/maturity.php3

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