Component Composition in Business and System Modelling

Bespoke development of large business systems can be couched in terms of the composition of components, which are, put simply, chunks of development work. Design, mapping a specification to an implementation, can also be expressed in terms of components: a refinement comprising an abstract component, a concrete component and a mapping between them. Similarly, system extension is the composition of an existing component, the legacy system, with a new component, the extension. This paper overviews work being done on a UK EPSRC funded research project formulating and formalizing techniques for describing, composing and performing integrity checks on components. Although the paper focuses on the specification and development of information systems, the techniques are equally applicable to the modeling and re-engineering of businesses, where no computer system may be involved

Component Based System Framework for Dynamic B2B Interaction

Business-to-business (B2B) collaboration is becoming a pivotal way to bring today's enterprises to success in the dynamically changing, e-business environment. Though many business-to-business protocols are developed to support B2B interaction, none are generally accepted. A B2B system should support different B2B protocols dynamically to enable interaction between diverse enterprises. This paper proposes a framework for dynamic B2B interaction. A B2B transaction is divided into the interaction part and business implementation part to support flexible interaction. A component based system framework is proposed,to support the B2B transaction execution. To support. dynamic B2B services, dynamic component composition is required. Service and component notions are combined into a composable service component. The composition architecture is also presented

Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

Mapping service components to EJB business objects

The emerging trends for e-business engineering revolve around specialisation and cooperation. Successful companies focus on their core competencies and rely on a network of business partners for the support services required to compose a comprehensive offer for their customers. Modularity is crucial for a flexible e-business infrastructure, but related requirements seldom reflect on the design and operational models of business information systems. Software components are widely used for the implementation of e-business applications, with proven benefits in terms of system development and maintenance. We propose a service-oriented componentisation of e-business systems as a way to close the gap with the business models they support. Blurring the distinction between external services and internal capabilities, we propose a homogeneous model for the definition of e-business applications components and present a process-based technique for component modelling. We finally present an Enterprise Java Beans extension that implements the model

Integrating the IS with the enterprise: Key EAI research challenges

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies provide the means to integrate strategic business solutions within and across the component parts of organisational information system infrastructures. The continuing development of both digitally integrated business models, through various eCommerce and eBusiness initiatives, has meant that the importance of EAI within enterprise IS, has increased significantly. Noting that EAI incurs not only technological but stakeholder-level commitments, this paper outlines the product of a sustained investigation into key challenges within Enterprise IS and EAI, and provides a framework for future research and investigation into this emerging and evolving area

Operational and real-time Business Intelligence

A key component of a company’s IT framework is a business intelligence (BI) system. BI enables business users to report on, analyze and optimize business operations to reduce costs and increase revenues. Organizations use BI for strategic and tactical decision making where the decision-making cycle may span a time period of several weeks (e.g., campaign management) or months (e.g., improving customer satisfaction).Competitive pressures coming from a very dynamic business environment are forcing companies to react faster to changing business conditions and customer requirements. As a result, there is now a need to use BI to help drive and optimize business operations on a daily basis, and, in some cases, even for intraday decision making. This type of BI is usually called operational business intelligence and real-time business intelligence.Operational Business Intelligence, Real Time Business Intelligence, strategic, tactical, operational, real-time.

Service-oriented modeling for e-business applications components

The emerging trends for e-business engineering revolve around specialisation and cooperation. Successful companies focus on their core competences, and rely on a network of business partners for the support services required to compose a comprehensive offer for their customers. Modulariy is crucial for a flexible e-business infrastructure, but related requirements seldom reflect on the design and operational models of business information systems. Software components are widely used for the implementation of e-business applications, with proved benefits in terms of system development and maintenance. We propose a service-oriented componentisation of ebusiness systems as a way to close the gap with the business models they support. Blurring the distinction between external services and internal capabilities, we propose a homogeneous model for the definition of ebusiness applications components. After a brief discussion on the foundational aspects of the approach, we present the process-based technique we adopted for component modelling. We then present an infrastructure compliant with the model proposed that we built on top of an EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) platform