Model-driven business process integration and management: A case study with the Bank SinoPac regional service platform

IBM Journal of Research and Development, Sep-Nov 2004 by Zhu, J, Tian, Z, Li, T, Sun, W, Et al

* Lightweight integration solution For a mid-sized company like Bank SinoPac, a lightweight integration solution is not just a feature that is nice to have. The term "lightweight" here has multiple meanings. First, the whole set of service methodology should be practicable for a small project team with limited external technical support. Second, the methods and tools should be easy to use so that they can be learned and applied by people with a normal business/IT background under limited training. Third, to keep a smaller footprint, most mid-sized companies wish to have a lightweight integration runtime solely on top of a standard application server; on the other hand, the flexibility and performance of the integration runtime should also be considered. In this specific case, for instance, Bank SinoPac wished to reuse existing commercially available application connectors.

* Cost-effective testing and debugging The testing of an integration solution usually involves linkage to multiple legacy systems, of which most are critical online parts of the daily operation system. It is far more complex than ordinary software testing, which normally includes a limited number of components and dependencies and can be executed in a staging environment. Testing has become a major challenge for traditional black box debugging technologies [21]. Therefore, an integrated debugging capability to easily step from process logic to connector code (and vice versa) is highly preferable. To take all dependencies into consideration, testers usually face the challenge that even thousands of test cases fail to cover all possible scenarios of a simple integration solution; thus, the capability to automatically generate test cases with acceptable function coverage becomes another critical issue for the efficiency of testing.

* Easy-to-use communication tools Many business process modeling tools today are based on either IT-Level models or tools (e.g., UML [22] used in IBM Rational Rose* [23]) or diagram-drawing environments (e.g., Microsoft Visio**, iGrafx Flowcharter** [24], and SmartDraw** [25]). For business consultants and analysts, additional training is required. Moreover, most of the tools are not designed for the working style of business consultants and analysts (for example, how to formulate a global system picture through the results of separate interviews with individuals). Therefore, more effective communication tools are needed to help establish common understanding on requirements among Bank SinoPac staff (from both business and IT units), and within the IBM project team.

* Resolution of Business-IT gap One challenge for today's software lifecycle engineering approaches is how to bridge the gap between business consultants and IT specialists, due primarily to differences in background, skills, and vocabulary. Some work has been done in the field of enterprise architecture (e.g., Zachman Framework [26] and Popkin Enterprise Architecture [27]), but this work is not focused on solution development. Designing an IT implementation that really conforms to business requirements is essential for the success of the project.