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October 30, 2003

The Portal Reborn

Process management's evolution, supported by recent technology advances, gives IT good reason to look again at what kind of portal will deliver the most value to users. Here are the best practices to help you succeed

by Mark M. Davydov

Continued from Page 2

Best Practice #4

Recognize the importance of visual management.

The role-based presentation theme also means focusing on critical characteristics of visual management — visual displays and controls.

Visual displays must communicate important information about process performance at a local, SME level, ensuring that standards in analysis and data interpretation are shared at that level. This approach raises the threshold at which important business process data is accumulated and presented, and therefore optimizes the number of information feeds from a given process needed for display in the portal at any one time.

Visual controls communicate information about non-normal conditions of the process, also at an SME level. This approach implies shifting the presentation from continuous information dissemination, through graphical techniques and associated reports, toward discrete information dissemination through alerts and process notifications.

Visual displays and controls create a uniform visual language in the portal, a collection of relevant visual displays and controls commonly referred to as a "portal scoreboard" (different from the Balanced Scorecard method). A well-designed portal scoreboard combines the presentation of balanced scorecards with page spaces (portal page "real estate") for displaying numeric indicators that control critical activities — such as customer service, cost management, and delivery — and for displaying alerts. For example a supply chain SME portal page might display, along with appropriate balanced scorecards, real-time indicators such as "on-time delivery to customers compared to sales-order due date" side-by-side with "on-time supplier delivery." As this example indicates, the main goal here is making important information easy to access and easy to act upon.

Visual controls and role-based presentation structuring allow you to implement powerful PM features such as management-by-exception and staff-resolution features that are supported by many leading workflow engines. One such engine is IBM's MQSeries Workflow, which handles dynamic, role-based routing and escalation of exception processing.

Best Practice #5

Encapsulate presentation integration features within the process integration layer.

There are multiple strands to this theme as well, but space permits me to address only the most essential one.

What often makes integration in portals overwhelming is the need to provide access to all the information in a single portal window, which is made up of portlets (mini-windows). The most common practice in portlet development nowadays is to establish a one-to-one relationship between portlets and applications. In other words, each portlet uses a specific application connector (adapter) to expose the corresponding application. It isn't difficult to see that such a practice will create numerous "point-to-point" connections, especially once you introduce extensive role-based presentation structuring with many business scenarios. As business scenarios change, developers will need to deal with the business logic as well as the connectors (especially with connectors) of the portlets in order to stay in compliance with scenario changes and other business rule changes, and to detect and deal with transgressions of presentation details. These constant maintenance and modification requirements may result in serious destabilization of the portal platform.

Now, let's discuss what the process integration layer usually does. This layer is responsible for event integration — ensuring that every process step as a unit of work in the business scenario process knows enough of the process to produce data and control information that will allow the next step in the process to work efficiently. Although event integration is similar to the information integration concepts of presentation integration, in a flexible portal environment, synchronization of information according to user interactions may require integration software to "reexecute" in order for data generated for event integration to be satisfactory for presentation. To avoid rerunning these integration processes, some portal vendors recommend doing it separately — event integration within a workflow engine and presentation via portlets.

To overcome these problems, the PM portal architecture should enable both aspects of PM integration — event and information/data — to be done within a single integration layer. (See Figure 3.) Such an architectural feature eliminates the need for portlets to deal with all kinds of connectors as information requirements change. Consequently, a single XML-based API between portlets and the process integration layer can be successfully instituted.

Obviously, this approach requires a technology wholly different from just a workflow engine, so that everything is synchronized — events and presentation. In an environment that has good event and presentation integration, portal servers have to be tightly integrated with workflow engines. This level of integration is the most important type of integration in PM portals.

What Does the Market Offer?

In general, when organizations enter newly defined niches in the IT marketplace, like that of the PM portal, they're walking on ground that is not just unfamiliar but also unsettled. Nevertheless, technology offerings are maturing with such speed that if you want growth and strong competitive advantage, you should seriously investigate the available products.

First let's briefly review standardization successes. Clearly, everything that is going on with Web services directly relates to PM systems in general and PM portal applications in particular. It's impossible to cover all current technology advances related to Web services within this article, but I have to mention the following, at least:

The Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI) produced the specification for the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) 1.0. This specification leverages many critical Web services specifications, especially the Web Service Choreography Interface, and defines a formal model description for expressing business processes at both abstract and concrete levels that can be translated into collections of private implementations executed as BPML processes using public Web services interfaces. Several products are coming to market that support BPML 1.0, including Sterling Integrator from Sterling Commerce Inc. and ARIS Process Performance Manager from IDS Scheer Inc.
BPMI is working on another very important specification, Business Process Query Language (BPQL), which will provide a standard language for querying business processes. BPQL will let you offer significant new capabilities within PM portals.

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Second, it is necessary to point out the progression of application servers. Leading J2EE application server suites such as IBM WebSphere 5 and BEA WebLogic 8, are on the verge of transforming into an integrated workflow and PM server by supporting BPEL4WS, specifically targeting critical PM-oriented features such as transaction coordination, compensation, and interaction-based event management.

Finally, what about automation of portal-related development? Significant progress has been made on this front, too. There are plenty of J2EE and .Net component generators on the market with really effective features for generating portal components from XML configuration files. Of course, these tools don't do the full job by any means, but they can speed up project, especially large ones. Take, for example, Bowstreet Portlet Factory, specifically useful on a WebSphere-based project with large numbers of portlets. This tool automates end-to-end processes of developing portlets, starting with creating the portlet functionality (including portlet customization capabilities), deploying portlets as Web archive (WAR) files, and finishing with installing the generated portlet WARs as portlet applications within the server. Tools such as Bowstreet Portlet Factory are well suited for application programmers who are relative novices in portal development.

Enterprises are inherently complex. Using emerging technologies such as the service-oriented architecture, Web services, PM, and PM portal applications to transform enterprises is even more complex. Nevertheless, pioneers are proving the incredible value of mastering this complexity.

Mark M. Davydov, Ph.D. [markdavydov@netscape.net] is a senior consultant for Bank of America. His areas of expertise include component development, Web technologies, and architecting large-scale systems implementations using portals, Web services, and process integration solutions. He has written extensively on enterprise application integration and portals.