The CORA Model

Introduction

This is the third 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 blog the key information technology trends within the "You Experience" cluster were mapped and assessed. In this blog post this is described regarding the "We Collaborate" cluster.

The "We Collaborate" cluster describes capabilities that help organizations tap the power of internal and external collaboration. By connecting to the outside world, fixed, predefined business transactions become ongoing relationships with clients and partners — all engaged in a continual cycle of learning, collaboration, innovation and co-creation of concepts, ideas, knowledge and tangible products. This is a “mesh network of everything” in which systems and information are shared by default, and new opportunities for collaboration — sometimes ad hoc or short-lived — arise over and over again. Organizations continually create opportunistic business mashups in which they draw together combinations of their own services and those of other organizations to quickly respond to opportunities, events and challenges. The following capabilities ("Technology Trends" or "Building blocks") are part of this cluster:

• Wikinomics: the social collaboration tools of Web 2.0 that enable new, open economic models, leveraging the power of large groups of collaborating individuals (crowdsourcing).
• Mesh Execution: enabling dynamic information-exchange configuration, typically taking place on an ad hoc basis.
• Smart Business Networks: catch, monitor and interpret events and information flows that seemingly occur too
  frequently and too randomly to be controlled.

CORA mapping

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

As shown in the figure the capabilities have a focus on the Channel Access, Composition and Integration Layer. The other horizontal layers are layers supporting these two depending on the architectural style used.

Wikinomics

Wikinomics (or 'crowdsourcing') stands for new economic models created through ‘Socialization of the web’, where information on the Web is tagged by users, not only for individual structuring and ordering, but also for evaluation by other users. This way social collaboration platforms let communities create and share knowledge in a highly collaborative way in which interacting with others is at least as important as the actual content that is being created. These social networks are relevant to organizations as they provide new ways of engaging with clients and potential clients. Wikinomics can of course also be applied to the internal organization to create new approaches to knowledge management and innovation. Today, many types of social collaboration platforms are implemented using both the ROA and the SOA architecture style.

Mesh Execution

Where individual 'Mashups’ focus on the individual representation of data and data streams from various sources, 'Mesh Execution' is about creating business mashups through orchestrating ad hoc and dynamic information-exchange. Often the individual mashups will be the enabler to create business mashups.

The focus of business mashups is therefore on orchestrating information and are almost always implemented using the SOA and ROA architecture style, eventually using all CORA layers. Because of this, special care must be taken regarding 'Authentication' and 'Principal Propagation'. Both are therefore mapped explicitly onto the model.

Smart Business Networks

Smart Business Networks aim to discover information contained in events happening across all the layers in a business network,  analyze its impact and then enable subsequent actions in real time. Thus technologies that enable smart business networks help to catch, monitor and interpret events and information flows that seemingly occur too frequently and too randomly to be controlled.

As the number of events and the size of the information flow rapidly increase, the optimization of intelligent agent software becomes a requirement, applying flexible business rules and artificial intelligence to automatically and dynamically optimize, route and orchestrate information and process flows.

Smart Business Networks are mapped on three horizontal CORA layers because of its focus at applying business rules (Composition Layer) on events within (Integration Layer) and outside (Channel Access Layer) the organisation. These networks are almost always implemented using the SOA architecture style. Because monitoring is very important 'Business Activity Monitoring' is mapped explicitly onto the model.

In the next blog post the technology cluster "Process-on-the-Fly" will be mapped onto CORA.