2004-11-8 11:19:20 Daiqinghai informationization continues to make more and more companies begin to face new challenges: How to rise from the past single departments to enterprise-class applications, thereby truly realizing corporate business automation And help companies improve their core competitiveness. In order to meet such a challenge, the construction of the enterprise information system must start from the past technology-oriented single application system development model. From the overall demand of enterprises, it is necessary to consider the current single department single business. Demand, it is also necessary to consider the comprehensive development of the company. This requires enterprises CIOs necessary to transfer their attention from the past a single department's business application to enterprise-class comprehensive planning. In this challenge, how to absorb the experience of predecessors, do not take the detachment of European and American companies, let China's IT construction takes the shortest time to catch up with the world's advanced level, it is worth exploring. Kirin is a prospective integration concept, developed the world's leading integrated platform BusinessWare, and is adopted by more than 500 large companies in the world and the government. Here, we share our views on integration, in order to promote China's information development.
Integration philosophy is the key to success
To successfully implement application integration, you must first establish the correct integration concept: The purpose of integration is to establish a corporate architecture, allowing businesses to flow smoothly. For any company, the purpose of establishing an IT system is to use IT technology to support business operations to improve its core competitiveness, not just to establish a perfect IT system without "information island".
A company must implement its customer information between multiple application systems to improve customer service quality at the same time, to ensure the efficiency of enterprises; the company's president must have a "president driving position" to make timely understand the business operations in time to do in time Decision. This is the driving force we have to solve the problem of "information island". However, only this is not enough to solve "information islands", IT technology must be entered into the company's production process to truly support business and improve the role of core competitiveness. For example, a customer purchases a telecom service, is it necessary to pay first after paying the service, or pay the service after the service? The answer to this question is different for different companies. It may also be different for different development periods of a company, and even the same company may be different for different customers. It is not only a problem that solves "information islands", but a flexible business process integration.
The core of integration technology is business process management. Today, business process management is concerned about every industry, which is widely used in finance, telecommunications, energy, manufacturing, government and insurance, etc. For example, bank channel integration requires a flexible service reorganization, from low-profit core business to other businesses more require business process management; the opening and failover maintenance of telecommunications services is also inseparable from business process management; manufacturing orders and production Management is also inseparable from business process management.
Integration is not just to solve the "information island" problem. Integration is to improve corporate information technology, so that IT has supported business and improving the role of core competitiveness. Implement this goal, inseparable from business application integration (EAI / BPI) techniques for business process management as the core.
Integrated plan is a guarantee for success
Compared with Europe and the United States, China Enterprises have relatively lag in two aspects: First, the IT application system is relatively small; Second, the existing IT system is relatively backward and integration is not high. This is not only an insufficient advantage, because this allows us to avoid the old road "first development, post-integration" in Europe and America, and fully consider integrated planning issues in the construction of IT projects, establish a comprehensive enterprise architecture, Enterprise information is shared offering reliable infrastructure.
For companies, a technology is not because of it, but to see what is the benefit of this technology, what is the problem? From the perspective of business, integration, not only solve existing "information islands" issues, but also prevent the same problem in the future. Since the development of any system has its limitations, the newly developed system today may also become the "information island" tomorrow, so the problem that corporate architects and CIOs should not be only certain business information. Synchronization issues, and how to build an enterprise IT system so that it is not only the ability to achieve information synchronization not only in the future. The problem of the process is also the same, and the process of cross-use process integration must be considered. It is not just a flexible process integration mechanism not just the goals to achieve, but also to provide a flexible process integration mechanism.
As a corporate architect and CIO, different applications must be divided into different applications according to the current needs and future development, and plan a integrated platform to connect them flexibly, and provide global process management and monitoring while providing Flexible change in the future. This requires a perfect corporate architecture. In this architecture, the original application system can seamlessly embed the business processes of the entire enterprise, business processes between departments, department and departments, business and enterprises The business process between the supply chain can be fully implemented.
Enterprise architecture should be combined with the needs of the internal process restructuring, in accordance with the global business process, integrate these data and applications, so that the business is driven in various applications, all departments, and realize the synergy between the applications, the synergy between the department and the whole The overall collaboration and automation of the enterprise range makes IT applications to provide business needs and provide adequate assurance for business processes. At the same time, corporate architecture further considers how to integrate with many business partners, upstream enterprises, and upper and lower enterprises, through B2B integration to automate the automation and synergy between each other.
Not only that, the enterprise architecture should also have powerful adaptive capabilities. Enterprise architecture is not cured, rigid, but open, scalable, scalable, and "keep up with the times". When companies are in the process of monitoring and analytical processes, discovering the bottlenecks and problems of some of these processes, and as needed to improve and improve the process; or as the company's development, enterprise architecture can provide fast It is easy to change the mechanism and ability of the process, so that IT's process can promptly comply with real business processes to meet business needs. With such a business platform, users can start from the top of the business logic, step-by-step, and ultimately implement the objectives of the application.
Integrated technology is a successful weapon with a correct integration concept and plan. The next important issue is to use a valid integrated weapon-integrated platform. For business, the problem that is usually encountered when choosing integrated weapons is: Is it a middleware product to write code integration from the bottom floor, or use a mature integrated platform? If you already have the right integration concept and a clear integration plan, then your answer to this question should be very clear, that is to choose a process integration as a core. It is very simple to make this choice: middleware can only solve the development of specific applications, and the integrated platform can complete the enterprise application integration from the business level. So what is the difference between the middleware and the integrated platform? The concept of middleware is born with three-layer (3-tiers) or multi-tie (N-Tiers) structure in the development of the Application Architecture. Before the three or multi-layer structures appear, the application usually uses two layers of structures, that is, the client / representation layer, and the server / data layer. In order to solve the transaction problem, the application logic shared problem and puzzle problem, the intermediate layer is introduced between the client / representation layer and the server / data layer, which is the middleware. Typically, the middleware is divided into transaction middleware, application intermediate parts and message middleware, which guarantees the feasibility of systemic isomer, scalability, and distribution operation, but the problems they have solved are mainly implemented. Integrated technology (EAI / BPI) is different. It is not a specific application development problem, but how to set up a variety of applications of a company, solve the synergy between department and department and enterprises and enterprises. Although integrated technology has developed on the basis of the newspaper, after more than ten years of development, it has long far beyond the category of the newspapers, but like an operating system and database, becomes an enterprise or government agency IT. An important part of the infrastructure is a question that the enterprise architect and CIO must first consider first. The first generation of EAI technology is to use reliable message middleware, rich connection and conversion technology and comprehensive meta data management and application capabilities, and solve the problem of information sharing and information exchange, but also makes the company The IT system is easy to maintain and manage, saving IT costs for enterprises. But the problems solved by this EAI technology are more focused on the data level, not the business level. In the mid-1990s, the rapid development of corporate business and the combination of e-commerce put forward higher requirements for application integration solutions, which is limited to the first generation EAI technology of information integration to realize automatic processing of enterprise business processes. Manage and monitoring, therefore, the second generation EAI technology based on business process management / integration (BPM / BPI) came into being. This generation EAI technology can meet business needs of enterprise business processes, which can meet business needs between enterprises and customers, partners, implement end-to-end business processes, smooth enterprises, information flow, and business streams. Second generation EAI technology is the mainstream of current integrated technology development.
At present, EAI technology is evolving to the third generation integration technology. This is "Prefabricated Integration". It is based on the characteristics of different industry integration technology. It is launched an industry-based pre-build-up package, which is pre-resolved the problem of industry commonality, thus shortening EAI project development. cycle. The key point for prefabricated integrated products is its "Reuse", "scalability", and "flexibility", which can ensure flexible configuration based on our own business while productization. And expand.
From the differences in middleware and integrated technology, it is not difficult to see that the integration of enterprises is not the middleware to solve. Only enterprise application integration (EAI / BPI) platforms with the process integration is the effective weapon to solve the problem of enterprise integration. Kirin Yuanchuang BusinessWare integration platform is such a platform. In the past few years, nearly ten years of successful use of nearly 500 large companies have fully demonstrated the integrated power of the correct integration concept. Source: CCW
