Enterprises have many different software systems that they use
to run their business. In addition, they have their own ways of integrating
these business components.
The two most prevalent business process integration scenarios are as follows:
- Integration broker: In this scenario, the business integration
solution acts as an intermediary located among a variety of “back-end” applications.
For example, you might need to ensure that when a customer places an order
using the online order management application, the transaction updates relevant
information in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) back end. In this
scenario, the integration solution needs to be able to capture and possibly
transform the necessary information from the order management application
and invoke the appropriate services in the CRM application.
- Process automation: In this scenario, the integration solution
acts as the glue among different IT services that would otherwise be unrelated.
For example, when a company hires an employee, the following sequence of actions
needs to occur:
- The employee’s information is added to the payroll system.
- The employee needs to be granted physical access to the facilities, and
a badge needs to be provided.
- The company might need to assign a set of physical assets to the employee
(office space, a computer, and so on).
- The IT department needs to create a user profile for the employee and
grant access to a series of applications.
Automating this process is also
a common use case in a business integration scenario. In this scenario, the
solution implements an automated flow that is triggered by the employee’s
addition to the payroll system. Subsequently, the flow triggers the other
steps by creating work items for the people who are responsible for taking
action or by calling the appropriate services.
In both scenarios, the integration solution needs to do the following:
- Work with disparate sources of information and different data formats,
and be able to convert information between different formats
- Be able to invoke a variety of services, potentially using different invocation
mechanisms and protocols.