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

* Asset reusability Reusability is a well-studied topic in the literature [28]. Design documents and implementation codes are intellectual assets which, if made reusable, will bring considerable value to current and future solutions. One criterion for software reuse efforts is the level of reuse [29]. It is easier to reuse high-level models than to reuse software code. Therefore, the integrated set of models across the phases of the solution lifecycle promotes more effective asset reuse; this is an important criterion for the project.

* Distributed working team management Given the fact that there are different project teams residing in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Nanjing, helping geographically distributed teams to understand the complete working environment for their job assignment is a great challenge, and many lessons have been learned over the years [30]. A widely distributed collection of individuals working separately can easily lose track of the others' work and progress [31]. As a result, another challenge is allocation of work items to outside contract programmers and testers to clarify job specification, job context, and quality assurance criteria, while avoiding disclosure of significant details of Bank SinoPac's business processes.

* Effective business/IT change management For an integration project, there are complex dependencies among system components. One single requirement change usually propagates across many other components of the systems, especially in the latter phases of the project. To guarantee on-time and onbudget delivery, changes should be managed at the enterprise level and analyzed by the architect for their potential impact before being accepted and implemented. Management of changes means managing the process of changes as well as managing all artifacts of an evolving software system [32]. Both Bank SinoPac and the IBM project manager wish to have the capability to demonstrate the possible effects of the change requests, from the perspective of both function and implementation impact, so that they can make the correct decisions.

* Alignment with existing service/software methodologies Expecting workers to pick up a totally different way of doing a job is unrealistic, especially for service teams that have already endorsed a well-defined software methodology, such as the Rational Unified Processes (RUP) [33]. Providing seamless mapping and alignment to existing paradigms thus becomes a critical issue for acceptance of a new methodology, especially when the project timeline is too tight to allow for much contingency for training time.

* End-to-end solution Each challenge above, in isolation, is not a major issue, and we may already have answers for them. There are still unresolved problems in addressing all of these concerns in a consistent and coherent way so that the project can be guided smoothly from the beginning to the end. Seamless connection of various phases of a solution lifecycle with some level of automation is a critical issue for most service and software methodologies. Most of today's integration projects require significant investment in money and time. Projects suffering delay caused by unexpected events are not uncommon. An end-to-end methodology to mitigate these risks is an imperative for success.