Asidua

Leverage ADI Today

As an IT director or CIO, you may have a particular strategy in mind for your enterprise. Given the demands of today’s global markets perhaps you are considering an approach which embraces change - an approach such as:

• building an Service Oriented Architecture
• undertaking Business Process Management
• building Composite Applications

Asidua has considerable experience in using an ADI solution to help you in these areas.

 

Service Oriented Architecture
Asidua recognises that SOA is an approach to building an architecture which combines reusable business services with decoupled business processes. Business services are units of IT resource, generally hosted on systems that do useful work on enterprise data (such as performing a credit check or submitting an order for delivery). It is the co-ordination of these services by end-to-end processes that generally allows an enterprise to deliver value to it’s customers. We feel strongly that SOA is not technology, but rather a way of utilising technology to better map services to business needs and hopefully more highly utilise IT assets. SOA simply allows a “pick-and-mix” concept where a line-of business processes to leverage the best of whatever the rest of the business can offer.

To make SOA work, there are several key architectural concepts that must be employed:

• key processes must be oriented towards people - generally a customer or user
• the way of accessing processes should be via a set of “front-ends”, each focusing on how a customer of user wants to access a process
• processes and “front-ends” should be de-coupled from the services which are invoked to do the useful work

 

Decoupling the key elements in this fashion leads to a much higher level of flexibility allowing new processes, services and front-ends to be employed as required. (view Asidua’s SOA model). SOA is about end-to-end processes, across a de-coupled architecture. So ADI must be pervasive across the architecture, accessible yet invisible to all. 

 

Business Process Management
Within Asidua we consider Business Process Management (BPM) as one of the key goals for deploying any ADI based SOA solution. BPM is a specialism that relies on a combination of domain experience, ICT and the techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyse operational business processes involving humans, organisations, applications, documents and other sources of information. BPM focuses heavily on applying continuous evolution to business processes, combining management methods with information technology so that managers can analyse and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch. Asidua specialises in offering ADI solutions that clearly separate automated business process from the services being invoked on business applications. This in turn makes this analysis and change of business processes more readily achievable.

 

Composite Applications
Composite applications are the next stage in evolution for an organisation that has adopted the strategy of SOA deployment. A composite application is an application built by combining services from enterprise applications and other enterprise-ready sources (e.g., commercial web services). Through the use of a composite application, our clients are able to leverage individual services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems whose outputs have been packaged, generally as web services (often legacy systems).