The CORA Model

Introduction

This is the fourth blog in a series about Capgemini's Technovison and the mapping onto CORA. In the first blog Technovision was explained, being in short the provisioning of a clear picture of the information technologies that are the most relevant to the organizations' business drivers and how these technologies and their evolution will impact business.

With Technovision the business drivers are mapped to innovations as an input to the IT-Strategy. With the CORA model the gap between the IT strategy and actual implementation of software is bridged because the CORA model can be used at different levels (Enterprise level, project implementation level) and has the possibility to design and implement elements with a mixture of ‘architecture styles’ on the best fitted platform available (or planned).

By mapping the 17 identified key information technology trends within Technovision onto the layers and logical elements of the CORA model the impact on the IT landscape is visualized and assessed in more detail. In the second and third blog the key information technology trends within the "You Experience" and "We Collaborate" cluster were mapped and assessed. In this blog post this is described regarding the "Process-on-the-Fly" cluster.

The "Process-on-the-Fly" cluster describes a new form of business process control and management, in real time and extremely close to operational business activities. Clearly, not all processes need to be configured and changed in an instant. But in many cases flexible processes — combined with embedded intelligence — provide organizations with differentiating capabilities to deal with a volatile business context. The entire solution space demands a detailed understanding of the enabling technologies, but at the same time puts the analyst at the very heart of the business requirements. Through standardization of solutions, more industry reference models will be made available to speed up the business analysis process. Examples of technologies in this cluster include business process management suite (BPMS) tools, business rules engines (BRE) and composite application platforms.

The following capabilities ("Technology Trends" or "Building blocks") are part of this cluster:

• Real-Time Business Process Management: real-time design, modeling, execution, monitoring and optimization of processes.
• Business Rules: define, manage and execute business policies with a language close to business speak.
• Composite Applications: creating an integrated environment to which changes can be applied with minimal intrusion on  underlying systems

Mapping the capabilities onto CORA result in the following figure (click to enlarge).

As shown in the figure the capabilities have a clear focus on the Composition Layer. The other horizontal layers are layers supporting this layer depending on the architectural style used. For the sake of simplicity the capabilities are described separately, but combinations of capabilities are possible, for instance using Business Rules within a H2A Orchestration.

Real-Time Business Process Management

Business process management pertains to the design, modeling, execution, monitoring and optimization of processes in an organization. With the new generation of business process management suites, business process management becomes an activity that can be carried out virtually in real time and in near proximity of the actual business. This revives a strong focus on the process dimension of organizations.

Flexible processes are relevant in the market-facing parts of an organization, where the dynamics of change are radically different from the core processes and systems deep inside the controlled part of the organization. A set of performance indicators is often used to measure services and process composition, and trigger their re-engineering.

A Business Process Management Suite is an integrated collection of software technologies that enables the control and management of business processes. These suites usually supporting XML BPEL [business process executing language] and BPMN [business process modeling notation] standards to construct flexible processes that are easy to define, execute and manage. Because these suites can be implemented using both the N-tier, ROA and the SOA architecture style special care must be taken when designing the processes to avoid mixing them in a wrong way.

Because Business Activity Monitoring is an essential part of this technology trend it is mapped explicitly onto the model.

Business Rules

Formally, a business rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. Business rules describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization in achieving its goals.

Business rules are often considered to contain the most core business practices and knowledge of an organization, even more than process logic. Extracting business rules from existing systems – then defining and managing them in a business rule engine or business rule management system – is a proven approach to achieve more flexibility on the business side and to have simplified, more manageable core solutions at the same time.

By maintaining business rules separately from existing systems (in a business rule engine), it is possible to apply them them when executing real time business processes. Business rule engines are often implemented using the N-tier architectural style where the business rules itself can be called in a ROA or SOA way.

Composite Applications

Many end-to-end processes currently require interaction with different silo systems. Regulatory compliance, for example, forces organizations to create dedicated control and reporting processes that spawn many different core processes and systems. As these dedicated processes tend to change frequently, it would be ineffective to implement changes in the underlying core systems and processes over and over again.

Composite applications is about the creation of new functionality by re-using functionality residing in exisiting applications. This way composite applications can be changed without intruding on the underlying systems too much. Because composite applications can be implemented using both the N-tier, ROA and the SOA architecture style special care must be taken when designing them.When the SOA architecte style is used the SOA governance become very important. Because of this these elements are mapped explicitly onto the model.

In the next blog post the technology cluster "Thriving on Data" will be mapped onto CORA.