Creating a flexible IT infrastructure -- one that allows for technical evolution, simple management of assets and processes, and leverages existing technology investments -- need not be just a utopian vision. Implementing an IBM On Demand Operating Environment helps you build, integrate, and manage business processes that can evolve as your enterprise grows, enabling more efficient configuration, operation, and monitoring of the IT environment. With streamlined business processes, your business is agile and able to respond faster to problems, saving time and money.

To demonstrate this concept, the IBM On Demand development team performed a pilot project called Oneida-2. In this project, the team implemented a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) prototype to demonstrate the on demand transformation of a realistic subset of Customer Order Analysis and Tracking System (COATS), a core business process of the IBM Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) model. COATS implements the main business processes used by IBM worldwide to fulfill orders of complex hardware systems. The goal of Oneida-2 is to implement an on demand business transformation in an actual supply chain scenario.

In this series of articles -- using a scenario based on a real hardware order-processing system used by IBM -- you will be presented with a methodology to implement an on demand environment to develop agile, on demand business processes. This scenario provides a common context and a set of use cases for the remaining articles in the series, which will cover patterns, modeling, workflow, rules, and monitoring. You will learn methods and techniques you can use to build reusable assets, all to support the rapid creation of on demand business processes.

Link to project implementation.