Business Objects plus (BO+): An Approach to Enhance Service Reuse and Integration in Cross-Domain SOA Compounds

Abstract

With globalization and rising competition, innovation cycles have shortened in recent years. Thus, the need for flexible and quickly changeable IT systems motivated companies to adopt new technologies and IT architectures, leading to novel concepts like the Industrial Internet of Things or Industrie 4.0. These concepts make it necessary to propagate information through multiple software systems and integrate data along the entire product life cycle and across different business domains. Companies often already rely on service-oriented Architectures to realize and solve integration problems. Due to the fact that service interfaces are mostly designed from a technical perspective, there still exist two important problems in everyday use: (1) property names of services oftentimes do not match established terms within a company, leading to communication problems between business and IT departments (semantic ambiguity) and (2) because of each service being developed separately, they do not follow naming conventions, leading to a format mismatch that has to be resolved for each communication path between two systems. In this paper, we present our concept for Business Objects plus (BO+) as well as the governance processes necessary to introduce them into and to manage them within a company. These Business Objects plus aim to remedy the problems described above, by defining small, self-contained data objects that can be used in service interface definitions to create a common semantic base for services and applications. The BO+ are motivated from a business perspective, supporting multiple hierarchy levels and therefore also aim to enhance reuse on the service interface level throughout a company.