Success on a Sound Software ARCHITECTURE

Software Magazine, June, 2000

The rise of e-business is forcing every company to reconsider how it conducts business. Most companies will spend the next several years figuring out how to take advantage of the business opportunities the Internet offers. Indeed, many CEOs believe if they don't figure out how to use the Web effectively, their companies won't survive the coming decade.

The popular press is filled with articles about e-business startups that are challenging established companies and stealing valued customers. Some managers of established companies worry about whether their companies can survive in the age of e-commerce. Although it sometimes appears that all the early rounds in the transition to e-commerce have gone to startups, several large companies have demonstrated they can hold their own. The Charles Schwab investment firm, for example, has established its dominance over several Internet companies that sought to enter the on-line trading business. Similarly, CNN, Chevron, The Gap, and Home Depot have all quickly adapted to the Internet and now successfully distribute their products and services on the Web.

While the temptation may be to rush a solution to market by the fastest means possible, savvy CIOs are looking for a way to build a long-term solution quickly, to avoid the necessity of rebuilding an unsound system in a few months' time. However, the key to making this approach work is to fuse business and technology architecture. The methods of business engineering and software development must be seamless. To enable this, the e-business development method must be based on two fundamental underpinnings:

First, there must be a technology infrastructure that incorporates a distributed object infrastructure as well as legacy applications and assets; and component-based applications to meet time-to-market goals while ensuring reliable software gets built.

Second, there must be a component-based development approach in which each layer in the architecture offers services to higher layers, while hiding the details of how those services are implemented. These architecture components must be reusable, easily integrated, easy to use, scalable and extensible. The Object Management Group's standards related to Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and the Enterprise JavaBeans specification, are both important pieces of the framework.

These technology standards are essential to enterprise architecture and inter enterprise architecture. Open standards provide the greatest opportunity to achieve the goals of portability and interoperability. A well-designed architecture should be able to accommodate change in its standard-related components.

For example, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard of the W3C consortium is a metalanguage useful to define industry vocabularies so that trading partners can interoperate. These vocabularies are evolving and today there are many of them. Creating open standards between and among these semantic towers of e-business is essential. Through creation of a number of industry task groups, the 0MG is helping in this process by working on task forces with sectors including finance, medicine, manufacturing, and telecommunications. The evolving architecture reaches deeply into the interactive relationship between participants such as customers and suppliers. In this way, the OMG is playing a crucial role in providing a neutral forum where industry organizations and companies can join together.

Transitioning to E-business

Companies often consider several e-business models when they begin their transition to e-commerce. Most large companies have already developed Web sites that provide customers with information. Similarly, many organizations already use the Internet to provide their employees with new ways to access internal company data and applications. Greater challenges, however, lie in the development of applications that will allow customers to buy products over the Internet or that allow companies to automate the buying process. These business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) applications are challenging because they require information sharing between systems that were never designed to do so.

Although many analysts distinguish between B2C and B2B applications, large companies find that enterprise e-business applications soon begin to merge. Even simple Web sales systems usually try to let the customer know when the product will ship or arrive. To do the former, applications need to link with company inventory, manufacturing, or shipping systems to determine the exact availability of the product requested. To determine when the product will arrive at the customer's site, applications usually need to link to the systems of the delivery vendor that will actually transport the product to the customer.

Many companies are modifying their business processes to allow their customers to tailor products to meet specific needs. Tailoring, if it depends on parts or components secured from other companies, usually requires that the selling company link its Web application to applications at the companies that make up its chain of suppliers. This allows the selling company to determine when needed parts or components will be available.