Chapter 4. Extended Enterprise pattern 71
What's next
If you are not yet sure that your business problem can be solved by the
functionality enabled through an Extended Enterprise solution design, the
guidelines in the next section provide additional information on choosing this
Business pattern. Business and IT drivers, the e-business context appropriate for
this solution type, and additional solution details are discussed here.
If you have determined that the Extended Enterprise business pattern can
provide an appropriate solution design for your business needs, the next step is
to select an Application pattern. The Extended Enterprise business pattern can
be implemented using any one of three Application patterns discussed here,
providing solution flexibility so that the selected Business pattern can address
the specific needs of the business process being automated.
4.2 General guidelines
To help you determine if the Extended Enterprise business pattern is appropriate
for the design of your inter-enterprise application integration scenario, this
section details the business and IT scenario into which an Extended Enterprise
solution fits.
4.2.1 Business and IT drivers
Businesses developing a solution needing the following characteristics should
consider using the Extended Enterprise business pattern:
? The business processes need to be integrated with existing business systems
and information.
? The business processes need to integrate with processes and information
that exist at partner organizations.
4.2.2 Context
The general problem addressed by this pattern is illustrated in Figure 4-1.
72 Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise
Figure 4-1 Extended Enterprise context
Interactions between partners form a public process, or potentially, multiple
distinct public processes. Each of these must be integrated into the private
business process flows implemented by each partner. Such integration might be
as simple as passing data to a particular application, or as sophisticated as
initiating or resuming a multi-step workflow involving several applications and
user interactions.
For example, Partner A (source application) and Partner B (target application)
agree upon sharing specific business processes and a process flow. Partner A
invokes a public process flow that in turn may invoke a specific private internal
process flow within Partner B's organization. Partner A is not concerned with the
details of Partner B's private process flow. Instead, Partner A cares only about
the results it expects in response to the invoked public process.
The “golden rule” of business-to-business integration is, the less you know about
the business partner's private processes and the implementation details of their
applications, the better off you are. This loose coupling enables organizations to
evolve their applications without affecting business partner's applications.
Obviously, specific functionality supported by these applications depends on the
particular details of the trading partner agreements and service level agreements
between the organizations involved. Yet a survey of such applications in multiple
industries reveals certain common approaches that have been successful.
These commonalities of success are harvested as the various Application
patterns that can be used to implement this Business pattern.
For example, take the case of a company that wants to integrate their retail
organization with diverse external wholesalers. The Extended Enterprise pattern
Nonshared
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processes
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business
processes
Nonshared
business
processes
Nonshared
Process
flow
Nonshared
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processes
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processes
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Partner A
Nonshared
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Shared
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Partner B
Chapter 4. Extended Enterprise pattern 73
will improve organizational efficiency and reduce the latency of business events
by integrating the external resellers with the inventory replenishment system and
reducing the likelihood of unfilled orders. The Extended Enterprise pattern also
applies a structured exchange with business partners and supports real-time
access to and from applications. This will allow the resellers to receive the
benefits of an updated inventory and receive real-time response of any out of
stock items.
The Extended Enterprise pattern also allows this company to minimize
application complexity and to integrate their applications with resellers that have
unique infrastructure designs. They will be able to leverage their current skills
and legacy investments, eliminating the need for extensive retraining and
infrastructure investments.
4.2.3 Solution
The Extended Enterprise pattern might consist of all or some of the following
elements:
? Business entities that typically consist of programs, applications, or
databases that exist within an organization that need to access and connect
to other business entities across the network.
? A network that:
– Is based on TCP/IP and other Internet technologies
– Can be a dedicated Wide Area Network (WAN) connection
? Business rules that:
– Manage the integration between the business entities
– Describe trading partner agreements
– Use workflow rules to determine the sequence of steps and the data flow
that needs to be used to facilitate the integration. These rules:
• Describe the sequence of steps that a message needs to go through
before being transferred to the other business entity
• Specify how and where the message should be delivered
– Use transformation rules to specify format and protocol transformations
that need to be applied to messages that flow between the business
entities
? A set of interactions that includes the execution of a jointly-agreed business
process
? Patterns based on those described by the business interaction patterns
framework.
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