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DESIGNING A LONG-TERM INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE FOR PROVISIONING TNC 2007 22 May 2007, Copenhagen Aida Omerovic Scientist & project manager – UNINETT FAS, NORWAY. -- Best practices from building architecture of an enterprise integration platform for provisioning
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DESIGNING A LONG-TERM INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE FOR PROVISIONING TNC 2007 22 May 2007, Copenhagen Aida Omerovic Scientist & project manager – UNINETT FAS, NORWAY
-- Best practices from building architecture of an enterprise integration platform for provisioning in heterogeneous, distributed systems
Business model • Serving Norwegian higher education sector; an integrated part of NREN • Expertise in integration, security, standardization, development/operation,contracting, deployment etc. • Contributing to innovation and excellence • Extensible initiatives - too demanding for individual organizations but feasible and cost-effective with joint effort and shared resources • Significant savings, improvement of service level, new use areas, deliverables and demands
Background • Provisioning: what and why? • Objective: efficient, dependable collaboration of systems and users • A set of large scale, software intensive and security critical systems • Distributed, decentralised, heterogeneous applications • Synergies in terms of value chain improvement and new services from system interactions • A “system of systems” offering more than the sum of the individual applications
Provisioning architecture in a cross-organisational environment
Dataflow within the integration platform • Functional examples of the dataflow • Contents of data for provisioning • Metadata consensuses. • Handling, mapping and dissemination of metadata. • Optimization of the workflow • Support and enhancement of the value chain
Important aspects • Modelling (working processes, dataflow) • Risk analysis, simulation • Security measures (a practical approach based standards, models and risk analysis and covering the entire set of interacting systems/components) • Timely revisions upon changes • Documentation • Quality criteria of the platform • Interoperability, maintainability and extensibility • Maintenance of quality through monitoring • Deduction of metrics
General experiences • Beneficial to have full control over the integration architecture • Consistent interfaces, maintainable interactions, reusable and portable services, optimized dataflow • The critical success factors • Compliance to standards, modularity and dynamic configuration • Data quality
An exemplar use scenario Institution-service supplier • Legal agreements • Configuration • Interface validation (transfer, syntax, semantics) • Testing • Deployment and user education Service supplier: • Reveal needs • Design, risk analysis, test plans • Implement interfaces on architecture and application • Extend services within architecture for the new interfaces • Documentation, in-house testing • Piloting • Information
An exemplar use scenario cont. Provisioning of user data into a set of applications: accounting system users, employees, catalog users and archiving system end users: • Supply the data from the authoritative systems into the UAS • Identify data sources and destinations • Identify conditions on the processes • Verify syntax, semantics, transfer mechanisms, security measures and frequency • Test • Develop and document routines, policies • Deploy • HR/student administrative system-> user administration system->provisioning architecture ->dissemination to a set of admin. Systems One vs. multitude of messages, contents Location of operational environments An exemplar scheema for incoming interface, deduced from IMS:http://forskningsnett.uninett.no/trofast/Integrasjon/Importformat.xsd
An exemplar building block: externally available syntax and semantics validation service • Standardised interfaces • Service specific rules • Dynamic, extensible rules • Used by customer organisations and vendors for validation, development and testing • Multi-level checking and reporting • User-friendly and reliable format -and contents analysis
Conclusions • A centralized integration architecture is a necessity when enabling interactions between distributed applications with heterogeneous technologies or between distributed organizations • A balance has to be made between the functional needs and the technical choices • The architecture includes a variety of built in, transformable and mutually compatible, interfaces. • The paper focuses on the scientific, mainly design-related, issues of developing a cross-organizational provisioning architecture, which supports an overall modeled or assumed optimal workflow at any time. • This is a toolbox to be used pragmatically, with best effort, but there is no “silver bullet”!
Questions/comments? • Thank you! • aida.omerovic@uninett.no