Common Business Components and Services toward More Agile and Flexible Industry Solutions and Assets

In many decades, many organizations, especially large consulting companies, have been designing, implementing and managing business solutions for every industry around the globe. But due to numerous limitations in process, tooling and skills, most of those solutions were made very specific to individual industry and client needs at its early design stage. Therefore, reuse and more importantly, managing the ever changing business requirements, become almost impossible. Service-orientation and architecture, model-driven business development provides us a new and powerful approach to facilitate asset based industry solution design and development. To further accelerate this, this tutorial will discuss an innovative approach that take advantage of many proven best software engineering practices, from object/component based technology, meta-data driven architecture types (archetypes) that are used to model the common structural and in some cases non-structural business entities such as customer, product, payment, etc. In order to address the consequences introduced by abstracting those common elements out of the specific industry model and be able to enable easy and meta-data based transformation, we properly decompose business components/services into a multi-layered business architecture. Therefore, process/components/services can be decomposed accordingly to facilitate the decomposition and abstraction, while maintaining certain level of necessary traceability across various artifacts. In the realization phase, existing assets/operational systems will be mapped and transformed to the required business components and services to best leverage those existing valuable industry/client investments. To support such a SOA based, model and business driven development process, existing tooling, especially the necessary transformation and integration capability, needs to be significantly enhanced. This tutorial will also present some recommendation based on some recent design and implementation, and they could be used to guide future tooling alignment and integration effort across software modeling, implementation and solution products. In addition, we will present how to leverage existing internal or external assets or product offerings and the open industry reference models and standards (such as ACCORD, ebXML, ARTS/IxRetail). This work is based on authors' collective experience in leading the large end-to-end client engagements across many industries, while promoting various industry leading software engineering best practices.