In my last post I spoke of exploring an SOA model and all of the components that I think are part of an SOA model. If I make any mistakes or should you disagree with my though process or this model, please feel free to comment or send email to me at kevin@kmmm.net.
Here is the model from my last post:
Users -> Portal -> BPM -> SOA -> EIM
Users: We all know what users are, most of us are users of one application or another. Users are the folks in the Call Center, or in accounting, or doing order entry. In a non-enterprise environment they are the folks looking at Utube or connecting to Linken-In.
Portal: Portals have really changed in the last 10 years to be flexible, with user configurable interfaces and no client side installations, portal have grown past Client Server repositories to flexible front ends, configure by Applications Support folks.
A good example of a portal is the Liferay Portal. The Liferay Portal is an open source enterprise portal with integrated security and many variations for flexible deployment. It is an off-the-shelf Portal that will allow most companies to be up in running in hours as opposed to developing Portal technologies within the enterprise.
Here is Wikipedia’s definition of an Enterprise Information Portal:
Enterprise Information Portals are one of the most popular ways in which enterprises can allow their employees and customers to search and access corporate information. It is a single gateway for users, such as employees, customers and company’s partners to log into and retrieve corporate information, company history and other services or resources.
BPM: Business Process Management: When I think of BPM I think of Business process refinement. In large enterprise’s, I see BPM as a Workflow, built into applications or a Workflows built into a process.
Here is Wikipedia’s definition of BPM:
The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. While such improvements are hardly new, software tools called business process management systems (BPM systems) have made such activities faster and cheaper. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch. BPM differs from business process re engineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at one-off revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolution.
SOA: Service Oriented Architecture.
Kevin’s definition of SOA: SOA is a flexible application development and deployment strategy. It is an architecture and a topology that introduces new business tasks and applications into the enterprise in a consistent flexible manner.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA [pronounced "sō-uh" or "es-ō-ā"]) describes a software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and software users. Resources on a network[1] in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.[2]
A service-oriented architecture is not tied to a specific technology. It may be implemented using a wide range of technologies, including REST, RPC, DCOM, CORBA or Web Services. to read more follow SOA link.
EIM: Enterprise Information Management
EIM overview and whitepapers from TechRepublic:
A coherent EIM strategy is a fundamental requirement for managing the huge volumes of data businesses accumulate. An EIM strategy will allow business users to have access to many and different types of information coming from multiple data sources across the enterprise. The information can then be accessed, in many cases, through an information portal being fed with data from operational data stores.
