BizTalk in our SOA

Below is an example of BizTalk in our environment. It depicts a real use case required by our business team.

The System of Record for Mary Kay Item data is our ERP application (J.D. Edwards Enterprise One). This has been declared by the business team of two organizations within the company (gasp!). Anyone who would like to subscribe to Item life cycle events should be able to register as a listener and receive them (BizTalk Messaging). All Supply Chain applications (5 domestic and 2 international) receive these life cycle events.

Of course, chances are if you give another application an Item (or a cookie), its not going to know what to do with it. Using BizTalk Transformations we normalize the Item event generated by JDE into a Mary Kay Supply Chain Item (working on further normalizing into just Item, old habits are hard to break). This SCS Item is now what everyone subscribes to. In the event that the System of Record becomes another system, or the schema produced by the current System of Record changes, the source schema can still be transformed into the SCS Item, thereby protecting subscribers from change with this layer of abstraction.

Once you start getting multiple applications talking together your probably going to need to add more than rudimentary business process. e.g. add an itinerary to process. e g. step 1, then step 2, unless some condition, then do step 3? BizTalk Orchestrations will allow you to handle this type of process flow.

While your implementing your business process, your likely to need to leverage a business rules engine. Something that's dynamic and can be updated at a moments notice in the event the business needs changes. Well, then the Business Rules Engine is your friend.

Gosh, now that I've got all this data flowing back and forth between my applications and systems, your going to need to track the data (Health and Activity Tracking). Things invariably go south at some time or another. Where is the message when this happens? Once you start tracking data your going to want to identify and track key performance indicators. Why did it go south? How long did it take the message to get from point A to point Z including all steps in between? This is where Business Activity Monitoring will help out.

Anyway, enough of a commercial for BizTalk. Don't know why my train of thought carried me down this path, but it did.


Footnotes
[1] Instead of 'normalization' I used to use the term 'canonical', meaning the generally accepted standard for the item. This term did not convey the right associated response they way that 'normalize' seems to.