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May 31, 2003

Data as it Happens

Data in real time, all the time, is what many enterprises want. To make it happen, IT needs to get the big picture — and not burn out on one-off solutions for single applications

by Mark Madsen

Business Process Management: The Future of Real-Time Data Integration?

IT solution vendors of many stripes — EAI, ERP, even ETL — are talking up business process management (BPM) as the next great step in the evolution of information integration. Generally, they are describing software that can orchestrate IT systems to support a business process. A business process model sits in the middle of this vision as the Rosetta stone for dynamically defining or reconfiguring systems to support the business process as it evolves.

From an integration software perspective, a business process involves, first, a sequence of operations carried out by people and systems: and second, all the related data. A classic example is order processing, where the steps in the process could include the following:

Enter order
Check customer's credit
Check inventory availability
Hold order
Release order
Ship order

Given this broad view, it's clear that BPM involves much more than managing the real-time flow of data from one application to another. BPM also requires the ability to define process models and to map those models to underlying systems. BPM must also address the integration of transactions across multiple, heterogeneous systems, with all that entails for software integration. Right now, BPM is a great vision of how we would like our IT systems to behave: but it's quite a stretch from real-time data integration or EAI.

Data integration is the technology infrastructure needed to manage information transport, not something that evolves directly into BPM, as EAI, ERP, and ETL vendors often describe. BPM should be built on top of real-time data integration because BPM requires proper dissemination of events to multiple systems as those events occur.

Deep In The Process

To configure and execute a business process model, you must be able to map the elements of that model to fine-grained services within an application. The challenge is that most applications, whether packaged or custom, do not make available the individual services that exist within their components. Unfortunately, most EAI and integration products do not solve this problem today. Instead, they provide course-grained integration between systems.

The heart of the problem is application architecture and design, which has very little to do with integration products. Until application systems make fine-grained services available, the step from process model to a configurable applications environment requires a significant development effort. Properly implementing the real-time data infrastructure will help support these efforts, as will integration tools. However, the core problem remains.

Right now, it's simply not possible to redesign a process model and dynamically reconfigure applications, even within the bounds of a single package. To coordinate a process change across multiple systems, you need a means of changing the association of key elements within all those systems. Today, these elements are not yet properly exposed. Only when each system can expose its services and reconfigure them on demand will BPM become a reality.