This paper provides an overview of the fictitious JKHL Enterprises (JKHLE) company, that is referenced throughout a series of service-oriented architecture (SOA) scenario papers and related work products, for the purposes of a case study. This case study describes how to apply SOA scenario realization patterns to solve common business and IT challenges using SOA principles.
The following narrative provides a context for how the JKHL Enterprises (JKHLE) Account Open Project originated.
“Sandy, I keep getting assaulted in the Executive Steering Committee Meetings over opening customer accounts. What is the problem? Why can't we fix this? I want you to work with the team to develop and execute on a plan to address this issue immediately,” Frank Adams, Chief Information Officer (CIO).
“This is the third meeting I've had with the Portal support team this week,” reported Sandy Ostrich-Archer, Chief Technical Architect. “We are continuing to suffer mounting issues with both our open customer account process and our multi-channel infrastructure across our business processes. As expected, support calls are rising, with calls ranging from customers expressing concerns over price inconsistency across our channels, to corporate customers threatening to throw us out if we don't rapidly complete their projects and bring their business online immediately.”
As Sandy scans the room looking at her newly formed Account Open Project architect team, she takes in the events that have transpired over the past week. “We need to get the Account Open Project moving forward and fast,” Sandy reinforces. “Our last quarter results show that revenue and profits are continuing to decline. Our executives are counting on this project to align our business objectives with both IT objectives and the infrastructure and to turn us around. Remember team, we only have six months to design and execute on the pilot!”
The Account Open Project is a direct strategy from the CIO’s office and is a direct result of major IT initiatives that are designed to align and facilitate business objectives.
2 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
Current company
To better understand the road ahead, we examine the JKHLE company profile, its customers and market segments, and the key challenges.
Company profile
JKHLE is a premier supplier to retail, small business, and corporate customers with a rich heritage as a high-touch retail company. (High touch refers to personal human interaction with customers.) JKHLE has been in business since the 1940s, has a well recognized brand, and has been winning in the marketplace with a high-touch approach to customers.
JKHLE has 900 Offices in six countries, including corporate and sales offices, customer centers, as well as call and data centers. It has grown to a total of 11 000 employees through a mix of complementary acquisitions and internal growth.
Customers
JKHLE’s customers are classified into the following market segments:
� Retail� Small and medium business (SMB)� Corporate
The retail segment generates the majority of the revenue; however, it is the least profitable. The SMB segment is a new focus area, but growth has been slow due to both the lack of the IT infrastructure that is required to support the segment and the need to target marketing specifically for this segment. Finally, with the latest acquisition of Jensen Inc., JKHLE’s corporate segment has increased and is currently the most profitable.
Challenges
Although JKHLE is a successful company on the whole, it has several key business and IT challenges that are preventing JKHLE from reaching maximum profitability. This section discusses these challenges.
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 3
Business challengesJKHLE has three key business challenges that require attention:
� The existing process to open a new customer account is poorly designed, which inhibits the ability to bring new customers onboard.
� The JKHLE sales channels are inconsistent across market segments. As a result, up-selling and cross-selling are significant challenges.
� Customer retention is poor and is becoming a bigger problem than ever before.
After analyzing the existing Account Open process, JKHLE has determined that one of the root issues stems from a lack of integration of systems as a result of the acquisition of Jensen Inc. and its large high-end corporate customer base.
At the time of the Jensen acquisition, JKHLE had little experience with the corporate market segment. JKHLE thought they could easily absorb the new corporate customers into their existing organization and infrastructure. In reality, JKHLE found that most corporate customers were unwilling to use the traditional Web channels, required custom interfaces, and demanded that JKHLE systems interface directly with their systems.
To satisfy the needs of corporate customers, JKHLE kept most of the heterogeneous systems in place. Bringing on new corporate customers meant considerable custom IT work, which has resulted in a rise in IT costs and reduction in profits.
JKHLE customers expect consistency across the following sales channels:
Corporate and SMB customers use the Web, storefront, and distributor channels. Retail customers use the Web, storefront, and customer call center channels.
Customers in each of the target markets segments have observed and reported inconsistencies in pricing and user experience when using the different sales channels. The Web channel does not reflect sales pricing and promotional items seen in storefronts as items go on sale. Customers in the corporate and SMB segment do not see the sale items consistently across channels either.
4 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
The current business processes and systems used to support the sales channels for each customer market segment do not share common components, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Current applications do not share common components for market segments
IT challengesThe existing structure of the JKHLE environment and IT organization perpetuate the business challenges that we have described. JKHLE has identified the following IT related challenges:
� The existing applications and the IT organization itself operate in silos. As shown in Figure 2, this environment currently relies on a point-to-point integration architecture, which is costly, time consuming, and rigid when the business requires change.
� There is little standardization of tooling and infrastructure. There are currently over 40 different development tools and infrastructure software as well as a wide variety of application types across multiple platforms.
� The organization lacks an end-to-end development methodology and governance, which is sorely needed to support the re-use of existing application components as flexible services across the organization.
Market Segments
Retail
Sales Service Credit
Corporate
Sales Service Credit
SMB
Sales Service Credit
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 5
Figure 2 Current environment
Proposed solution
JKHLE is at the beginning of an enterprise transformation initiative. JKHLE understands the key problems that keep them from reaching their goals and has asked IBM® to help them plan and implement the transformation using SOA and proven methods from IBM. With the flexibility and interpretability that SOA provides, JKHLE can enable change and build a bridge between business and IT to effectively transform and increase the value of their company.
RemoteSalesJ2ME
MarketingSharepointWubdiws
2003 Server
FinanceThin Client
Finance3270 / 5250
Call CenterReps
ExtranetWebSphere
Linux
Risk Management
DB2
CreditIDMS
CollectionsIDMS
SAPDistributed
Holds the consolidated GL, Supply Chain and Partner Management
(TO BE)
IBM Content ManagerOn zSeries
Holds all billing andstatements
(TO BE)
CMStores
RDBMS
ImagePlus
Accounts RecDatabaseCICS 2.x
Holds the customermaster record for JK
Accounts RecDatabase
DB2 on zSeriesHolds the customer
master record for Jenson
Ordering / Billing DatabaseDB2 on zSeries
CICS 3.1 / Cobol / DB2Holds the consolidated
billing data
IntranetJbossLinux
401kExternal Partners
Employee DBDB2 Distributed
Payroll / Vacation
SellableResource DB
DB2 on zSeries
BusinessIntelligence DB
SQL Server
Siebel Distributed
Holds the consolidated CRM
(TO BE)
6 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
Account Open SOA adoption
The decision to adopt SOA for the Account Open project was driven by the need to improve business agility and flexibility, which provide the ability to respond quickly to new business opportunities and competitive threats.
To achieve this goal, JKHLE must transform into an On Demand enterprise by defining business services and then by building an infrastructure with reusable business services that can be accessed consistently from any channel and any part of the business. The platform must be measurable, not only technically, but must also include business-level metrics.
JKHLE is aware that this is a complex effort that can present challenges and questions, such as what is the best way to create services for re-use across the organizations and what are the best practices for governing these services. With support from IBM, JKHLE is confident that they can transform their enterprise successfully by applying SOA principles.
SOA refers to a way of designing, building, and running the software portion of an information technology infrastructure so that it supports the various individual and interrelated functions that are needed to operate a particular business process in an enterprise. An SOA approach breaks down a company’s business tasks and the underlying IT into reusable components or services. These services can be reused and combined into business processes, as the business requires change.
There are four approaches to implementing SOA, and each SOA adoption approach can build on each other, leading to full enterprise-level adoption:
1. SOA-related technology adoption focuses on an SOA-related technology project, such as Web services or BPEL implementation.
2. SOA preliminary deployment or pilot project adoption is used to transform a single business process, such as opening new customers.
3. Business solutions adoption addresses a company's specific business problem usually within a process or business component.
4. Enterprise adoption or transformation is a large scale adoption that integrates business and IT at the enterprise level.
JKHLE decided that they will employ the second approach to SOA adoption and will focus on the process to open new customer accounts, along with the supporting infrastructure such as security and governance measures. This project is known within JKHLE as the Account Open Project.
The IT department has committed to implementing the Account Open Project pilot in six months. After implementing the pilot, the team will report to the CIO to
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 7
assess and define the next SOA phase for JKHLE to reach its long-term goal of transforming the entire business.
Account Open Project
The Account Open Project is the first major SOA implementation. The project optimizes the process and tasks for opening new customer accounts by providing a common user interface and experience for each market segment and sales channel. The resulting process will reduce the time that is required to onboard a new customer significantly, thus bringing in revenue faster and improving the bottom line. The new Account Open process components will be shared across channels as displayed in Figure 3. This process enforces a consistent experience, which results in improved customer satisfaction.
Figure 3 Shared business services
Additional services will be designed and implemented to support the domains of information integration, interaction and collaboration, human task management, and business rules to name a few. These new services will supplement the enterprise services already in place to support the Account Open process.
Figure 4 displays the Account Open process in detail. Notice there are many interactions required with subprocesses, components, and systems. In some cases, human interaction is required for approvals in the process.
Operations Strategy &PlanningAccounting
Sales CreditService
Shared Business Services
8 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
Figure 4 Account Open process and actors
Account OpenProcess
Credit ReportingService
DataAdministration
CustomerApplication Credit Portal
Finance Portal
Submit Application
SecurityServices
1
Customer Sales Person
Credit Request2 Credit Report3Application4
Application action5
Raw data6
Cleansed data7Monitor AccountOpen Status
8
Entitlement request9
Entitlement response10
Application Disposition
Account Manager
Data Administrator
Credit Manager
Customer ServiceRepresentative
11
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 9
Sandy Osbourne-Archer, Chief Architect Technical, leads the IT team in researching and defining how the proposed JKHLE solution environment will be transformed to support the Account Open process as displayed in Figure 5.
CICS 3.1 / Cobol / DB2Holds the consolidated billing data
SAP DistributedHolds the consolidated
GL, Supply Chain and Partner Mgt
SiebelDistributed
Holds the consolidated CRM
IBM Content Manageron zSeries
Holds all billing records and statements
IBM Records Manageron zSeries
Holds all SOX / PCI Records
ODSIBM Information Server
DB2 on zSeries
MarketingPortal
Call CenterPortal
Remote SalesJ2Me
FinancialPortal
CustomerPortal
EmployeeIntranetPortal
WebSphereBusinessServicesFabric
WebSphereProcessServer
WebSphereESB / MB
JKHLE PortalWebSphere Portal Server
Credit ReportingServices
401k ExternalPartners
CorporateAccounts
Suppliers
RiskManagement DB2
Credit IDMS
Collections IDMS
BusinessIntelligence Tables
Employee TablesDB2 Distributed
Payroll / Vacation
Customer MasterRecord Tables
Trading PartnerGateway
DataPower TIM TAM
TFIM ICIRACF
WebSphereBusinessMonitor
ITCAM forSOA, WAS, RTT
Tivoli Monitoring
Server
Tivoli Discoveryand Change Mgr
Financial Records IMS on zSeriesIMS TM
Adapter
IMS SOAPGateway
10 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
Solution requirements
The solution requirements for the Account Open Project are categorized into focus areas that are designed to work together to achieve the business objectives.
Service CreationService Creation involves the creation of flexible, service-based business components. JKHLE will identify high-value existing IT assets and service-enable these assets for reuse. The solution will expose existing backend systems, such as CICS® and IMS™, as services to be more easily consumed for reuse. In cases where there are no in-house applications that can be service-enabled to fill identified gaps, the team will either develop new services from scratch or select services from third-party vendors.
For more information refer to Case Study: Service Creation SOA Scenario, REDP-4377.
Service ConnectivityService Connectivity links people, processes, and information within the business and the extended enterprise through a gateway or Enterprise Service Bus. The solution enables the Account Open process to access multiple channels, access back-end applications, federate organizational units, and provide business-driven service availability.
For more information refer to Case Study: Service Connectivity SOA Scenario, REDP-4380.
ProcessA business process is a set of business-related activities that are invoked in a specific sequence to achieve a business goal. Business processes consist of tasks, which are comprised of human interactions, an automated workflow, information services, business rule interactions, subprocesses, and the invocation of functions and services.
For more information refer to Case Study: Process SOA Scenario, REDP-4381.
Interaction and Collaboration ServicesInteraction and Collaboration Services are designed to improve people productivity. The solution will allow customers in each sales channel to have a unified portal based user interface that interacts with disparate backend systems in the Account Open process, from both rich and mobile clients, in connected and disconnected modes. The new process portal includes human task interaction,
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 11
electronic forms, portal views based on role, single sign-on, and enhanced collaboration capabilities. The management team will have the ability to monitor the status of accounts in the Account Open process.
For more information refer to Case Study: Interaction and Collaboration Services SOA Scenario, REDP-4375.
Information ServicesInformation as a service offers information access to complex, heterogeneous data sources within an enterprise as reusable services. JKHLE needs take advantage of and manage existing information. The solution can accomplish this through service-enabling relevant information to be shared throughout the organization and allowing real-time capabilities to access and manage both structured and unstructured information. The solution should also provide an interface to both automated and manual data cleansing functions to support post-validation corrections to information.
For more information refer to Case Study: Information as a Service SOA Scenario, REDP-4382.
Business Process ManagementBusiness Process Management is a discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate process improvement and facilitate business innovation. One of the key requirements is to accelerate the account open process. To achieve this, the solution should support modeling the current process for eliminating redundancies, workflow (both human and automated), and the ability to capture and display metrics on account opening to support financial operations. Also, there is a need for business logic to govern process behavior and have the ability to change rules in real time.
For more information refer to Case Study: Business Process Management SOA Scenario, REDP-4383.
Service DesignService Design aligns the modeling of business design and IT solution design through a set of roles, methods and artifacts to render a set of explicit business processes for optimization and services for composition and integration. To align its business objectives properly with its IT goals, the Account Open team must begin by analyzing the business architecture through one of the key services methodologies from IBM, perform data architecture to create the System Data Model, and perform service analysis and design.
For more information refer to Case Study: SOA Design Scenario, REDP-4379.
12 Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview
SOA GovernanceSOA Governance embodies the management of relationships between services and other parties along with ensuring services’ compliance with the laws, policies, standards and procedures under which an operation operates. The solution must consist of a formal process for assigning decision rights, implementing policies that are derived from business rules and instituting measures around the service processes and life cycle. Furthermore, the solution must streamline the processes for service registration, service versioning, service ownership, service discovery, service access, service and composite applications deployment, and security of services.
For more information refer to Case Study: SOA Governance, REDP-4384.
SOA Security and ManagementSOA Security and Management includes security services, discovery, and monitoring of SOA resources for SOA environments. The JKHLE team will design and deploy SOA security and management solutions in support of the Account Open Project deployment.
For more information refer to Case Study: SOA Security and Management Scenario SOA Scenario, REDP-4378.
The team that wrote this IBM Redpaper
This paper was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the International Technical Support Organization (ITSO), Raleigh Center.
John Ganci is an Architect and Specialist for the IBM Software Group, Scenario Analysis Lab (SAL) in Raleigh, NC, USA. His areas of expertise include SOA, middleware integration, WebSphere® Application Server, e-commerce, pervasive computing, J2EE™ programming, and technical team leadership.
Mark Colan is a Worldwide SOA Evangelist and Sales Executive for IBM, located in Cambridge, MA, USA. He is known for presenting the latest developments in SOA technology, standards, and strategy and products from IBM to customers.
Veronique Moses is a Senior Product Manager with the IBM SOA Platform Consumability team. She has more than 10 years of software development experience and has made significant contributions to the software product portfolio from IBM. She currently leads a key IBM initiative focused on enabling the SOA entry points through defining and providing best practices collateral.
Case Study: SOA Account Open Project Overview 13
John Sanders is a Senior Certified Executive Architect with the Worldwide SOA Technical Sales team from IBM. John has more than 20 years of experience in communications, systems design and integration, application design, and SOA.
Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this project:Erica Carmel, IBM Program Director, SOA Platform Consumability, USAAllan Dickson, IBM Strategy and Planning, SOA Platform Consumability, USAMartin Keen, IT Specialist, ITSO Raleigh Center, USALinda Robinson, ITSO Raleigh Center, USA
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