Composite Applications

Composite Solution Architectures & Composite Solutions are the next frontier for business and IT agility in the Enterprise. An Enterprise Composite Solutions Platform is an essential requirement to materialize the related benefits.

The Next Mile in Business and IT Agility

Agility is a competitive differentiator; agile businesses "turn on a dime" and want to adopt new business models, launch new products quickly, dominate global markets, and drive efficiencies throughout their supply chains. These businesses look for information technology (IT) as an enabler for change, and they constantly push the limits on what IT can do to empower their people and arm them with the right tools for success.

However, enterprise IT departments are mired with challenges. As businesses grow through acquisitions and mergers, there is always more than one system to perform a particular task. Information is spread across systems, processes are disjointed and disconnected, and users have to deal with multiple systems to achieve their business tasks. Integration and maintenance of the systems tend to consume the bulk of a typical enterprise's IT resources—thereby, hindering both the ability to adopt new technology advancements that can benefit the business and the ability to scale to servicing the myriad requirements for truly empowering users. This could result in unmet needs and a backlog of requirements for applications that truly can empower users.

Currently, several practices are adopted and applied to address the challenges associated with integrating heterogeneous systems and IT assets. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) and enterprise-application integration (EAI) technologies promised to significantly simplify system integration; data warehousing aimed to provide a single unified view of data for analysis and decision making; and many methodologies and frameworks were invented to unify the processes across the enterprise.

The latest in this crusade is the idea of service-oriented architectures (SOA), which takes a fresh approach at addressing these woes through loose coupling, well-defined service contracts, and service aggregation. All of these approaches enable solution patterns to address the system-integration challenges in an enterprise, but they fail to support the goals of business agility and innovation.

To address this failure, a shift is required from the classic and predominantly "system-centric" focus of enterprise IT priorities to a model that strikes a finer balance between "system-centricities" and "user-centricities." The investments that are made on SOA should directly benefit end users in terms of new, powerful, and integrated experience for analysis and decision making. When composite-solution architectures are adopted and applied, they can help IT deliver this value. The practice of using composite-solution architectures can optimize IT investments to achieve the following:

• Empower users and enable federated "self-service"–style user composition of high-value applications.
• Enable IT to invest resources in research and development that is related to new technology advancements that can benefit the strategic directions of an enterprise.

Composite Solutions

Currently, composite solutions are built in enterprises by assembling and presenting business data and processes from multiple existing and related systems as unified and composite wholes. However, these solutions do not have to be restricted to composing Web services and information feeds; instead, they should include components at higher levels of abstraction and user-centricity, such as structured presentation artifacts, unstructured artifacts as documents and spreadsheets with embedded business semantics, workflows, business rules, alerts, user-comprehensible business-intelligence data models,  reports, and data views.

The notion of situational applications is another interesting advent of relevance to the notion of solution composition. A situational application is created on demand for a small number of users who have specific needs, and the duration of the application's existence is short-lived. Even though these types of applications are highly valuable to users in enterprises, they constitute a significant chunk of the "Long Tail" of user requests that are low on the list of enterprise IT priorities.

Situational applications are a common use case for collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft Office SharePoint—for example, an Office SharePoint team-collaboration site that is created to support a new product campaign/launch. Situational applications provide immense value for the duration of the project. Generally, they are built by the users themselves, with IT governance enabled by the underlying IT platforms. Today's applications in this category are used predominantly to facilitate unstructured collaboration among teams of business workers.

The full potential of composite-solution architectures can be materialized by breaking away from the classic IT/system–centric approach of solution composition to optimizing IT investments in a way that enables a finer balance between the IT/system–centricities and user-centricities. Put simply, the key to unlocking the next mile in IT and business agility is to focus IT investments on the creation of user-consumable components that can enable solution composition by users who are familiar with the business domains.

The idea of user-centric composition is taking shape today in the consumer/social world, in the form of user-friendly information-consumption experiences that are enabled by such tools as Microsoft Popfly, Yahoo! Pipes, and Google Mashup Editor. Mashup tools, mashing, and mashups are the terms that are used in the consumer/social world to refer to these tools, the experience of using them, and the composite information assets that are created by using them. These tools enable users who have little or no IT/development experience to "mash up" information feeds on the Internet. For example, a user can use Popfly to create a Mashup that displays the geographical locations of friends on a map by using the profile information of these friends (stored in Facebook) and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Enabling similar experiences and the related benefits in the context of enterprises is essential to traversing the next mile in business and IT agility.

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Benefits of an Enterprise Composite Solutions Framework

A well implemented Enterprise Composite Solutions Framework can yield significant benefits in IT agility by empowering users to self compose IT solutions that effectively support their functional needs, using abstracted and reusable components & services that are federated and managed by Enterprise IT. View this video to develop a broad understanding of the benefits that a composite solutions framework can enable in an enterprise.

Figure 1 summarizes the key benefits of an Enterprise Composite Solutions Framework. These benefits include:

• Achieving broader implementation and usage reuse of solution assets enabled by IT
• Composite user experiences that integrate & aggregate data and processes from across a multitude of enterprise systems
• Componentized solutions deployment and upgrades that eliminate the need for monolithic systems deployment & management
• Empowering users to self compose IT solutions that effectively support their functional needs while adhering to the federation, security, and governance policies instated by Enterprise IT

An important aspect to keep in mind is that a supporting composite solutions platform is required to materialize these benefits.

Figure 1. Composite Solutions

Composite Solutions Platform Capability Requirements

A Composite Solutions Platform is required to materialize an Enterprise Composite Solutions Framework.

Figure 2 summarizes the core capability requirements of a composite solutions platform.

Figure 2. Composite-solutions platform capability requirements

The capabilities can be categorized broadly as core capabilities and advanced surround capabilities. The core capabilities are "must-have" requirements for any composite-solutions platform to enable and materialize the full benefits of composite-solution architectures in an enterprise. The advanced surround capabilities are additional features that can add rich semantics and value to the overall application-composition experience.

The core capabilities include:

• Platform support for the notion of componentization through capabilities that support the design and implementation of components and the ability to host/render components in run-time containers.
• IT infrastructures capabilities to enable federation, security, and governance, while empowering users and enabling the benefits of composite-solution architectures. In the context of solution composition, this would include the ability for IT to centrally catalog, describe, and control access to components that can be used by users across an organization to compose applications of relevance to their needs.
• Application-composition tools that can cater to the requirements of developers and power business users who have an IT background.
• The advanced surround capabilities include:
• The ability to model and capture rich component metadata that extends beyond descriptive attributes, to capture semantics that pertain to the intricate relationships that can exist between components and enable domain-tailored discoverability of components.
• Application-composition and provisioning tools/services, to extend the reach of composing applications to business domain experts who have minimal IT skills and enable a semantically guided prescriptive application–composition experience.

The Microsoft Office 2007 System is an inherent Composite Solutions Platform that enables materializing the benefits of composite solution architectures. The OBA Composition Toolkit is a framework that surfaces these inherent capabilities. Explore the OBA Composition Toolkit to learn more about the benefits and value that composite solution architectures, OBAs, and the toolkit could enable for your organization. 

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