Articles

By Joe Simmons

The business-processing environment is a mixture of complex resource and technology dependencies that somehow integrate to meet and achieve business goals. IT Systems Managers generally focus on the technologies and Business Managers typically tackle the day-to-day business and resource issues. Profitability and success require a cooperative effort between the two.

While the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model has been around now for several years, adoption is still somewhat lagging. The biggest hurdle for most people is understanding what SOA is, what it can do and how to apply it to your existing business model. Do I need an Enterprise Service Bus? Is it all about messaging and services? What about security? Who and what participates? Is it an all-or-nothing approach? Typically, SOA encompasses all of these disciplines; however, Web services seem to have the most promise and traction in current implementations.

The real advantage of SOA is the opportunity to use a standard, non-proprietary method to integrate the numerous applications and technologies at the business-process level. The focus shifts from systems and resources to business services that promote automation, collaboration and communication. Organizations can now be business-driven by sharing applications and data, and move away from IT-driven models. This reduces cost and complexity by providing true integration in a common business format, independent of a particular platform.

The CA Workload Automation products participate in this new business-management model by brokering the scheduling functions as simple and standardized Web services. This allows any SOA participating applications to integrate with the CA Workload Automation solutions as business logic dictates. For example, Life Cycle and Change Management have primary control over the promotion of assets and processes; CA Workload Automation ensures the timely and accurate execution and monitoring of these processes, and Problem or Service Level Management is used to notify and manage issues as processing exceptions or conditions arise. If each discipline participates in SOA, processes can be defined, automated and orchestrated at a much higher level of management. At this level, a particular service from a given application can be utilized (consumed) without concern for the underlying technology or product. Business logic now dictates the processing and flow, rather than the dispersed or independent solutions.

The common set of Web services offered by the CA Workload Automation solution are standards-based and abstract the specific functions of the products. The services are:

• startWork
• stopWork
• holdWork
• releaseWork
• showWork
• setCondition

This common set of Web services can be used to integrate and automate the scheduling functions into your processing flows and to define repeatable processes. This optimizes your business processing and reduces the requirement of human intervention and the risk of potential errors.

There is a great opportunity to leverage the framework of SOA. Organizations can automate business processes through cooperation and sharing of data to achieve their business goals. A change in thinking is required where communication and collaboration between organizations is used to drive the business to a service model. Integration, automation and simplification of the environment helps IT support this service model while reducing the costs and risks inherent in IT management today. The CA Workload Automation Solution participation in SOA by brokering a common set of Web services ensures that the critical workload and job scheduling management functions are readily available for integration into existing and new business models.