From the IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal.
This series of articles discusses the end-to-end process of creating composite business services with IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric Version 6.0. Part 1 introduced the idea of composite business services, and how WebSphere Business Services Fabric supports the development of these services. In preparation for performing indepth composite business service development, this article begins with a review of a business case, explains how WebSphere Business Services Fabric can help resolve the proposed business problems, and illustrates the resulting analysis and design steps.
Case Study: Bank loan application
Our example involves the fictional International Bank (INT Bank), which is undertaking a modernization effort of their loan application service through a services-oriented approach.
INT Bank is the parent company of International Bank of Texas (INT-TX) and International Bank of California (INT-CA). The major business of INT Bank is in providing loan services. To achieve a better understanding of their customers, and to be able to provide valuable loan products for their customers, the roles of loan officer and loan reviewer require different quality levels of customer credit information:
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The loan officer needs to analyze an applicant's credit in order to provide a loan that is suitably customized to the customer. INT Bank has an Integrated Loan Application Management portal that provides both the loan information and the integrated customer credit information.
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The loan reviewer uses the company's Loan Risk Evaluation portal to evaluate the risk associated with a specific loan application, which helps in making an approval decision. In addition, the loan reviewer needs to have even more detailed customer data, like transaction history and customer credit information, in order to reduce the company's bad loan ratio. In the bank's current loan application process, each subsidiary can have different policies and solutions based on geographic marketing requirements and local state laws.
INT Bank maintains an internal Customer Credit Information System (CCIS) that manages and tracks customer loan transactions. To reduce risk and achieve acceptable credit evaluation results, INT-CA wants to provide a different customer credit evaluation service to their loan reviewers. There are many credit evaluation service providers in the market, and each of them has a different credit perspective and quality of information. INT-CA chooses a service provider called Credit Digger because of the provider's renowned high quality. Since the service cost of Credit Digger is higher than using the internal CCIS system, INT-CA's policy is to apply Credit Digger based on the size of the loan, and on the wallet share of the customer applying for loan.
In addition to the systems mentioned above, three other INT Bank internal systems are also involved in the loan application process:
- Enterprise Customer Management database: Manages prospect and basic customer information.
- Loan Product database: Holds loan product information.
- LDAP-based single sign-on facility: Provides user authentication.
Finally, INT Bank has a core IT staff at corporate headquarters who are responsible for administering the loan application service. INT Bank wants this staff to have capabilities to troubleshoot problems, monitor system performance indicators, and possibly extract a variety of business metrics, as the business dictates.
How WebSphere Business Services Fabric can help
Before analyzing the requirements, let's look at the WebSphere Business Services Fabric features that can be used in this case.
Policies define the business requirements that must be met when a consumer requests a service. A policy consists of three parts:
- Context of service request
- Content, which is the request itself
- Contract, which are the requirements to be met.
For example, INT-CA (context) would like to use Credit Digger (contract) for customers whose wallet share and loan size meet certain criteria (content).
In WebSphere Business Services Fabric, a service's capability is described by assertions. You can define service capabilities along five dimensions:
- Performance
- Reliability
- Interoperability
- Security
- Manageability
You can extend the industry ontology to add assertions for describing the service capabilities that are custom to your enterprise IT environment.
Dynamic business services assembly
At run time, the Business Services Dynamic Assembler determines the set of policies that are relevant to the service request, and then selects the best service provider (endpoints) that meets these requirements.
In the beginning, a design worksheet is used to analyze the business requirements behind the scenes in an organized way. Based on the functions provided by WebSphere Business Services Fabric, the business context can be analyzed according to these categories:
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Multi-mode of access
What are the channels through which users can access the system? A composite business service (CBS) can provide the ability to provision a business process across multiple modes of access without resorting to duplication of applications, or requiring infrastructure or technical support, thereby providing complete interoperability among the different access modes.
-
Organizational entities
A CBS offers the ability to represent different entities (organizations, sub-organizations, and roles) in the domain ecosystem so that it can provide personalized services for a subscribing entity through a provisioning process.
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Assets
What are the existing IT assets in the system? A CBS can interoperate with source services from disparate assets in the domain ecosystem, including legacy assets, third party outsourced assets, and new in-house assets.
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Policies and assertions
Design of a CBS will involve defining the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) associated with different entities, and services as policies based on context, content, and contract. In addition, domain-specific extensions might also be required if base CBS models do not adequately address the business requirements.
Listing 1 shows the results of the business requirement analysis in the form of a design worksheet.
Listing 1. Design worksheet and analysis results for INT Bank
Multi-Mode of Access
- Integrated Loan Application Management Portal; direct user interaction
Organizational Entities
- Organizations
1. International Bank (INT Bank), headquarters
2. International Bank of Texas (INT-TX)
3. International Bank of California (INT-CA)
- Roles
1. Loan Officer
2. Loan Reviewer
3. Customer
4. IT Administrator
Assets
- Legacy Assets
1. Loan Product Database
2. Customer Credit Information System (CCIS)
3. Enterprise Customer Management Database
4. LDAP
5. Loan Application Management Portal
6. Loan Risk Evaluation Portal
- External Assets
1. Credit Digger
Define Policies and Assertions
- Loan request from all subsidiaries (except INT-CA) should use the CCIS as credit
evaluation service.
- Loan request from INT-CA that meets the conditions should use Credit Digger as
credit evaluation service.
- Loan request from INT-CA which DOES NOT meet the conditions should use the CCIS as
credit evaluation service.
- Assertions for a credit evaluation service includes wallet share of customer applying
for loan and size of loan. |
Figure 1 shows the interactions between channels, processes, and services. The loan officer and loan reviewer access the Loan Application Management portal and Loan Risk Evaluation portal through the Web channel. The loan business process runs on WebSphere Process Server. The Business Service Dynamic Assembler routes the request from the business process to the proper service according to the policies and assertions defined by INTBank. Per the business case, there are two endpoints for the Customer Credit Service, one provided by CCIS, the other provided by Credit Digger.
Figure 1. System interaction
This article provided an example of how to analyze the business case and produce a design worksheet. In the next installment, you will use this worksheet to develop ontology extensions, a composite business service model, and to simulate the policy-based endpoints selection with Composition Studio.
- Part 1: Introducing IBM's new platform for business service modeling, assembly, and deployment
- Part 3: CBS modeling, ontology editing, and policy simulation
- Part 4: Service assembly with the Dynamic Assembler SCA component
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IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric product information
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IBM SOA Foundation: An architecture introduction and overview
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Patterns: Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services
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Service-oriented modeling and architecture: How to identify, specify, and realize services for your SOA
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IBM developerWorks SOA and Web services zone
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IBM SOA products and services
Libra Huang is an IT Architect with SOA Solution Center (SSC), IBM Software Group. His background is in J2EE and is now heavily involved with Composite Business Services (CBS) assets development for banking industry.
Hicks Lin is a developer from IBM China Software Development Lab in Taipei. He is currently developing Composite Business Service (CBS) applications for banking industry. He is interested in SOA, J2EE and other emerging server-side technologies.
Jimmy Tan is a senior developer from SOA Solution Center, IBM Software Group. He is developing Composite Business Service (CBS) for banking industry. He is interested in SOA, J2EE and software architecture.
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