Business Event Subscriber Responsibility?

Thought I would write a comment about what are some of the expectations of a business event subscriber.  These would be rules that the business event publisher could depend on.  These sets of rules form the basis for Event Driven Architecture (EDA) based implementations.

Subscribers of business events and business alert notifications often assume that the business event publisher is responsible for insuring that duplicate events and any repeat alert notifications are suppressed. However, to protect itself the subscriber has to be able to "analyze" the business event to determine if the erroneous event/ alert was sent by the business event provider, messaging architecture or the enterprise service gateway. The subscriber (business application, business process) would have to "know" when to discard the business event as being a duplicate event, as well as when to re-apply the same business event, which could have been issued as a result of change in the business policy or due to an increase in the business alert thresholds.  Knowing when an event transmission is real versus a false notification insures that the outcome of the EDA implementations are valid.

For instance, if a "low inventory alert" is received by the Purchasing Process it may react to this alert notification by transmitting a PO to the supplier. However, if the same Purchasing Process gets a second alert a few seconds or a few minutes later chances are the Purchasing Process may choose to ignore this. Not examining the alert more closely may cause it to erroneously discard the alert.  It is possible that in order to optimize and tune the response processing the subscription process just looks at the product and quantity to de-dup alerts received within a certain period thus causing the second alert to be discarded. The business impact of ignoring the second alert was failure to increase in the "minimum product level". The bottom line, the subscribing process has to know how to differentiate between fundamental business rule changes and duplicate alerts and not have a compute process optimization overrule business policies.

In general, in an event driven architecture realm the disconnectedness of the publisher/ subscriber pair places a burden on both parties to insure that there exists a mechanism and rules to enable "semantic" translation of the message payload that carries the business event or the business alert.  Without investing in the definition and analysis of these semantics benefits of the loose coupling EDA architecture would deliver a scalable technical architecture model but would not yield the right business outcome.

It must be noted that standards such as WS Eventing, WS Base Notificaitons and WS Notification help to define WSDL and XML Schemas for defining the mechanics of loosely coupled and inter-operable EDA implementations but the business semantics and rules in constructing and consuming the events are not really well laid out.  Not having had exposure to specifications such as ebXml and OAGIS business documents I assume some of the B2B interactions may have more mature semantic definition but for the most part I think these rules of engagement may still need to be fleshed out by the participating parties.

Thoughts and feedback on this topic would be very useful.
surekha -

Service granularity and service reuse - why information semantics are key?

In the following blog which refers to the Amazon CEO's "letter to the share holders" one is truly amazed to read about how the Amazon team constructs a single product detail page from a combination of 200 to 300 services!!

Amazon architects may have truly found a way to identify the right level of service granularity to combine these into composite service offerings - without causing the information in the combined service to be distorted. This so called semantic dissonance has led many of us architects to create coarse grained services which preserve the quality of information but at the cost of reuse!

This is the the balancing act of how to define a service with the right grain of information encapsulated in it such that once it is combined with another service the combined service is still able to deliver meaningful information at the same grain of the originally combined services.  This is what we mean by semantics that govern how to combine two or more granular services to create a meaningful composite service which continues to encapsulate information that is valid and accurate.  It may be technically possible to create a composite or a single course grained service starting from two granular services (long as the canonical models/ payload have common elements) but the combination may overlook key business constraints, business rules, regulations and algorithms that render the final response invalid and inaccurate.  

A very simple example, combining product sales of a region with product marketing dollars to yield a service that delivers marketing efficacy may be a great new service concept.  However, if the product sales service does not provide information about the tenure of the product company by region or the presence of similar competitor products by region then the marketing efficacy service is not able to account for lift in the sales accurately.  The reason being marketing efficacy service cannot appropriately reflect the efficacy of the marketing dollar as being attributed to the "novelty" factor (where in the product is the first to enter the market in this region, or else if the product has a very attractive "entry price point" as it's debut to this new region).  Both of these artificially show that the marketing campaign strategy is far more successful than it might really be.  The price and novelty had more to do with the sales lift. 

 

The use of information by the business to make strategic decisions and the study of information flow across lines of business and the alignment of business information to strategic business activities is key to business architecture. By extension we find that it is in the realm of business architecture to govern service interactions and the creation of composite strategies to guard against semantic dissonance. 

Please share with me your thoughts.

surekha -

 

Issues with SOA Adoption

Here is my attempt to identify some of the reasons for failure to adopt SOA. This time the focus is on not having a holistic SOA enabling infrastructure.

Many large enterprises try to reduce vendor-lock by not having a single provider for their entire SOA development/ deployment stack. This philosophy works great from a risk management perspective. However, this risk management strategy directly competes with the “speed to market” gains promised by SOA.

1. Not having a unified platform that facilitates seamless integration across the service orchestration layer, the application layer, the data layer etc. leads to long system integration and debugging cycles
2. Not having a centralized facility for the end to end management and monitoring of services can cause long outages and hampers the ability to track information/ transactions flowing across the various layers of the service architecture (i.e. service orchestration layer, the application layer/ business logic layer, the data layer etc.)
3. Not having a holistic SOA governance suite that enable discovery of existing service assets at design time and that provides service utilization information at runtime causes service proliferation issues

The following blog by my colleague and co-blogger Yogish prompted me to address this issue as it speaks to Oracle/ BEA integration strategy two big names in the space of SOA infrastructure.

Analysis on Oracle’s BEA integration strategy

In lieu of the one year anniversary of Yogish’ blog I am being optimistic in assuming that this acquisition will lead to the creation of a holistic SOA platform that encompasses service interactions at design time and runtime. I am also hopeful that a single SOA platform will provide seamless integration across various layers of the architecture as in the service orchestration/ mediation layer, the business logic/ application logic layer and the data layer. In addition, my hope is that a stronger player such as Oracle (following the BEA acquisition) would start pushing for “SOA standards” and start holding other SOA players accountable for staying compliant with these (in much the same way that the other vendors would now be putitng more pressure on a stronger SOA contender such as Oracle (following the BEA acquisition) to abide by these same standards. This "peer pressure" will hopefully make interoperability an achievable goal.

In the event Oracle is able to pull together a holistic SOA stack then here are some advantages for its' customers -

1. Having one vendor support the end to end stack enables a customer to find the right support whether it be from the perspective of SOA product suite integration or from the perspective of availability of the right tooling to enable and enterprise to cut down its' service lifecycle timeline (service design, service deployment) and improve its' time to market.
2. Having a player such as Oracle that has traditionally focused on scalability, reliability and end to end monitorability will provide customers with a SOA platform that is robust enough to meet the stringent SLAs at runtime while making service availability more predictable and less of a guess work at runtime
3. Having one vendor provide a holistic service governance suite will allow an enterprise to reuse its enterprise service assets (if authored appropriately) thus enabling the business to compose existing services to offer new capabilities.

In conclusion, I want to state that I do not align with Oracle or any other SOA player but merely want to comment on issues that have hampered SOA adoption and how these might be addressed. I believe that a unified SOA infrastructure platform will be a key capability needed to truly realize the full potential of SOA.

Thanks for listening.
surekha -

Missing-link between Business Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)!!!

Before we embark on the effort of establishing a link between Business Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) here is an attempt at creating a loose working definition for each.

SOA is an architectural paradigm that allows one to model, build and measure reusable business components that can be flexibly assembled to offer a business service.

Business Architecture is an architecture style that structures the accountability over the most important business activities (for instance production, distribution, marketing, etc।) and/or the economic activities (for instance manufacturing, assembly, transport, wholesale, etc.) into domains.

To begin with here are a few key SOA principals that all apply to the realm of Business Architecture. Principals of loose coupling, abstraction, reuse and interoperability (of both messages and the operations) all of which facilitate composition of more course grained business services.

So what does a Business Architecture effort entail and how is SOA relevant to the discipline of Business Architecture? Business Architecture should focus on broad reusable business components that can be turned into or wrapped into reusable service components and/or business services. The term reuse has received a bad wrap but when looked at from the lens of being able to offer enterprise wide consistency and cross-business area interoperability one begins to realize that this very attribute of “reuse” has the potential to deliver speed to market and cost reduction both of which are touted to be powerful selling points for SOA. From this perspective Business Architecture can be seen as a precursor to SOA.

Business Architecture should be designed to help align the right business operating model (low cost services provider or innovation oriented service provider or niche services provider or a service provider that offers low cost processing to meet regulatory compliance needs etc.) with the value chains and the component business processes. Following this effort one would need to study how to alter business activities and those value chains that are directly impacted by the changing business needs (which are external influences to the operating environment). Without undertaking this study it is not possible to identify "appropriate" business strategies that fit the underlying operating model chosen by the business. This effort has to precede SOA based service definition work as this thought process enables rationalization of the current state “service worthy assets” and helps in the identification of business service interface for these assets.

Given the above description of the discipline of Business Architecture one would logically arrive at the conclusion that for the concept of Business Architecture to truly take root in any organization it is imperative that business strategy be considered the "driver" of the Business Architecture effort(s). In addition one will notice that package solutions and infrastructure / frameworks can only be treated as an enabler for the identification of business optimization opportunities (within the value chains and their component business processes) but are definitely not the drivers of Business Architecture work or SOA work. There are some other considerations as well such as the role of a Business Architect, the executive sponsorship for Business Architecture etc.

The role of a Business Architect is a critical aspect of Business Architecture to succeed. Since the “business aspect” of Business Architecture is important finding someone with the right type of business knowledge to fulfill the role of Business Architect would be a must have. Also, having someone with the ability to apply the philosophy of architectural abstractions to the business domain is important. Fortunately for us architects this is great news as some of the lessons learnt from SOA can now be easily translated to the realm of Business Architecture long as we have the right level of business expertise as well.

Having said that, Business Architects will need to be cognizant of the fact that they have to strike a fine balance between their technical and business skills. In addition, people in this role have to be careful to not engage in prematurely promoting the principal of business process abstraction (a core architectural principle), without first establishing the right foundation for introduction of this concept. The reason is that the Lines of Business owners possess a very keen sense of pride in being “unique” and abstractions often lead to the erosion of or removal of “unique” customizations where ever these interfere with the larger scale intent of the business process/ value chain.

Business Architects need to have enough business savvy to engage with their business partners on an equal footing. They have to first express the nuances of the various problem domains before they start the process of abstracting and drawing parallels across the business processes owned by the multiple Lines of Business. Even during this phase Business Architects have to be able to explain these abstractions in business syntax and show how the competitive advantage “uniqueness” can still be incorporated without loosing operational efficiency. To be able to articulate the concept in business lingo and to tie this to financial impact by walking through the underlying analysis is the only way to get business buy-in given that these are the metrics up on which Lines of Business owners are measured. If not done by garnering the right partnerships the resultant enterprise-wide operational efficiency or competitive advantage benefits would never be realized.

If one cannot find this Business Architect, a cross-functional team with complimentary skills may be able to pull this off. In order for such a cross-functional team to be able to execute effectively on any large scale Business Architectural/ SOA effort it must have the support of a prominent executive sponsor. The executive sponsor has to be able to articulate business strategies, and influence key representatives of the Lines of Business to collaborate with a group such as the Enterprise Architecture Group. Executive support of such a team enables it to effectively analyze and abstract broad Business Architectural constructs and can help define and drive business solutions to implement business strategies that align with the chosen operating model of the organization.

An oft asked question on executive sponsorship is whether it is the CIO or the CEO and the influence that technology has on such an effort. This depends on the type of organization, the charisma of the CIO and the business acumen of the CIO vs. the technical acumen of the CEO. Also, key to this decision is whether technology is a business driver for this organization or is at least a key component for driving the operating margins.

Finally, for Business Architecture, the related SOA work and the business solutions to be considered part of a sustainable model this body of work has to deliver tangible and measurable benefits. The measures and the value proposition will have to be agreed upon at the outset of embarking on this path/ journey. In addition this multi-step journey has to be associated with a set of well-understood and well-published multi-year target business deliverables.

For some additional information on Business Architecture please review content on related blogs:
Business Architecture – Process Architecture and Information Architecture!
Key Best Practices - What is Service Orientation?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Surekha -

Canonical Models and Services

In thinking about canonical models one mostly thinks about an enterprise worthy or industry compliant representation of a business concept or a business entity। Often this canonical model compliant payload is packaged in a response envelope that is returned by the service provider. However, the question is whether the term canonical model can be used to define the " business request" or if it is limited to the "business response". This blog explores the canonical request models that might be used to alter the behavior of enterprise services using search services as an example.

Let us look at a "search service" where one could think of a "context based search request" that is made to the search facility to make the search behavior of the service providers more efficient। In addition, this "search context" could also be used to express the specific search needs of the service consumer. Given this, the question is whether the canonical model could be used to define a request model that is a representation of the service provider search/ browsing parameters and service consumer's usage context. Here the search capabilities of a search service could use search/ browse related grammer rules to interpret the search context that is embedded into the request by the consumer. The context provided by the consumer allows the service provider to "accurately" and "efficiently" interpret the request.

For example, search semantics embedded in a search service that returns cross-sell product options could include information like "customer preferences", "type of credit card used by customer", "shipment processing preferences", "customer purchase history" etc। This type of "customer information" represents usage semantics embedded in the request and allows the provider to return cross-sell product options that are geared to the the specific customer being refered to by the consumer call। This in turn allows compilation of product suggestions which incorporate the profitability levels and purchase ability of this particular customer. The "customer information" is deemed to be the search result and usage context that are sent into the search request. These search results are thus customized to the consumer context without the consumer needing to make multiple calls to get the desired results. Therefore, one could see how the canonical request model has not only the standard search parameters supported by the provider but also allows the consumer to express its' search context and how it might apply the results of the search/browse call.

In addition, the canonical request model based search context could be used by the consumer to drive processing efficiencies in the provider। These request based keywords/ context can help the provider eliminate or short-circuit certain types of processing as well. For example, a canonical request model could support "new customer search" vs "existing customer inquiry" keywords to help alter the providers' audit processing behavior and past inquiry Here a consumer call with "new customer search" context could be used to suggest to the provider that the audit/ security and past inquiry lookup be disabled thus positively impacting the response time of search call.

In conclusion, we can see that the consumer usage semantics allow the provider to tailor it's search behavior to the needs of the consumer without changing the provider service interface.

Please give me your feedback on this topic। Also, I would be interested in knowing whether or not you have leveraged these concepts in your industry vertical।

Surekha -
Thank you!!