Week 6 Flashcards
1
Q
What are interoperability problems?
A
- e-Business implementations automate only a small portion of the business transaction process. For example: Reduce error, better management of inform.
- Ordering & delivery of goods can be fast but the supporting accounting & inventory info., payment & funds transfer lag as there is no communication between business processes.
- The decoupling of accounting & payment info. from the ordering & delivery of goods introduces serious drawbacks:
- increases credit risks
- introduces discrepancies between the various information sources requiring expensive & time-consuming reconciliation.
- Electronic business must be based on a common set of protocols & standard processes that ensure interoperability.
2
Q
What is Enterprise Application Integration?
A
- EAI is a key enabling technology that has emerged to help organisations achieve intra-enterprise integration and drive operational efficiency within the corporation.
- It is a strategy that does not specify products, tools or technology for its inception.
- EAI provides the infrastructure to reuse, rapidly connect, interface & unify information between an organization’s internal applications into a cohesive corporate framework within the enterprise.
- EAI represents both the products as well as the process of integrating new & legacy applications (including packaged applications) with data files & databases.
- EAI is non-intrusive: the applications being integrated do not change or the changes are slight & insignificant.
3
Q
Explain Asynchronous Messaging?
A
- Asynchronous communication promotes loose coupling in which an application does not need to know the intimate details of how to reach and interface with other applications.
- Each participant in a multi-step business process flow need only be concerned with ensuring that it can send a message to the messaging system.
4
Q
Explain the publish/subscribe interaction model
A
- Applications communicate by exchanging messages
- Senders do not specify the the recipients of the message they just publish a topic of interest
- Receivers have to subscribe with the middleware for topics of interest
- Middleware retrieves the list of subscribers of a topic and delivers the message
5
Q
explain Message-oriented middleware (MOM)
A
- Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is the back-bone infrastructure that is responsible for relaying data from one application to another by putting it in a uniform message format. JMS (Java messaging server) app between applications.
- Features that make the MOM particularly attractive when integrating applications:
- Prioritization of requests
- Load balancing
- Synchronous/asynchronous messaging
6
Q
EAI topology: point-to-point
A
7
Q
EAI topology: publish/subscribe
A
- Publish/subscribe technologies use subject or topic names as the loosely coupled link between publishers and subscriber systems.
- Publishers produce messages on a particular subject or topic name and subscribers receive those messages by registering interest in the subject name.
- Modern publish-subscribe EAI messaging tools are based on the multicast model where messages are published by being sent once & are received simultaneously by all subscribers.
8
Q
EAI topology: Hub & spoke
A
- A central node manages all interactions between applications. Each application does not have to integrate multiple times with several other applications, it simply carries out one integration process on the central node.
- The central node handles communication with other applications. The most popular hub and spoke EAI solution is integration brokering
9
Q
Explain data integration
A
- Data integration is the ability to share & exchange relevant business data from a variety of sources and integrate it with other such related data items despite differences in data formats, structures and intended meaning of business terms under possibly diverse company standards.
10
Q
Business process integration layer
A
- Aim is to automate business processes which need to access data and business logic across disparate back end applications. Process-oriented workflows are used to automate processes with well-defined & stable structure.
- Builds on EAI to ensure business processes are executed in the defined order using the required data
- Builds on middleware providing:
- Process execution engine
- Visual process definition tools
- Process monitoring tools
- Business process integration (BPI) is the ability to define a commonly acceptable business process model that specifies the sequence, hierarchy, events, execution logic & information movement between systems residing in the same enterprise & in multiple interconnected enterprises.
11
Q
EAI benefits
A
- Lower development costs
- Integration is simpler because systems are more loosely coupled than in object brokers
- Lower opportunity costs
- Integration is done more quickly
- corresponding cost savings reachieved sooner
- Lower maintenance effort
- adapters extract the interaction with external systems
- significant advantage from the software engineering point of view
12
Q
What is e-business integration?
A
- e-Business integration is about coordinating the flow of information & processes among enterprises & their underlying systems. Aim is to facilitate supply, distribution & customer information exchange, coordination and collaboration between multiple trading partners.
- e-Business integration typically combines automated services from multiple provides, e.g., partners for the supply chain, to support extended transaction management and, more importantly, information exchange, coordination and collaboration across the extended value chain.
- Critical elements of e-Business Integration:
- Integrated business processes
- Information-exchange infrastructure
- Syntax & Semantics
- Reliability
- Security
13
Q
What are the e-business integration objects?
A
- Integration of both processes and data, rather than simply enabling information to be passed from one system to another
- Integration is non-intrusive: most source and target systems are not be altered
- Integration exploits the concept of reuse of existing apps & systems
- Functions in real time, at the back end, with little end-user influence or effort
- Allows end-users who understand very little about the details of the applications to integrate the applications
- Exploits common agreements between trading organizations
- Supports a uniform process and data model enabling application integration both within and between enterprises
- Takes advantage of advanced security standards to ensure that information moving between companies is not visible to others on the public networks.
14
Q
Whats the rol of standards in e-business integration?
A
- Standards needed for cross-enterprise application integration.
- Open standards drive the e-Business revolution:
- XML: an excellent data transformation facility for standardizing message transformation between partners
- It can provide a standard for shared data and data definitions
- Defining industry-wide standards
- Use of XML in EDI
15
Q
Whats business process management?
A
- BPM (Business Process Management) adds conceptual innovations and technology from EAI and e-Business integration and re-implements all of it on the new e-Business infrastructure based on web & XML standards.
17
Q
Explain integrated enterprise
A
- Ensures that end-to-end business processes are managed and monitored in a complete fashion across and within all business units.
- Driven by management recognition.
- Most suitable for small enterprises and larger where a common standard integration toolset is imposed.
- Supported by EAI integration brokering and workflow infrastructure.
- Advantage: provides enterprise-wide process management.
- Disadvantage: requires implementing business process management across the entire organization
18
Q
Explain brokered enterprise
A
- Ensuring that processes are managed and monitored across all business units by means of a broker business unit to provide both infrastructure and business process management.
- Driven by management recognition.
- Applicable to organizations where the individual organization units want to maintain their autonomy but benefit from the advantages of a hub-style service management and a common messaging infrastructure.
- Supported by EAI integration brokering and workflow infrastructure.
- Advantages: the number of relationships that need to be managed and coordinated between business units is reduced.
- Disadvantages_: fragmented image_ when looking externally to the enterprise.
19
Q
Explain federated enterprise
A
- keeping the business units autonomous with common message standards provided for cooperating business units.
- Driven by the expectation that business units are completely autonomous.
- Applicable to organizations where the individual organization units want to maintain their autonomy but benefit from the advantages of cooperating with other business units.
- Supported by EAI integration brokering and workflow infrastructure.
- Applicable standards include UDDI framework and XML.
- Advantages: each business unit is autonomous and free to publicize its own processes and services.
- Disadvantages_: little support and accountability for process_ management and enterprise-wide process improvement and implementation.
