Advertisment

Reusable enterprise IT solutions

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, we have a rapidly changing competitive business landscape. Business endurance and continuity rely on the capability to timely respond to the evolving business demands. Information is the key to survival, maintaining competitive advantage and reacting rapidly to business situations. IT systems, therefore, need to be integrated and adaptable in order to deliver this.

Advertisment

Developing solutions for enterprises is becoming more complex by the hour. The drivers in increasing this complexity include:

* Integration of a wide array of legacy systems with next generation solutions to achieve the optimum business productivity.

* Interoperating with multiple applications.

Advertisment

* Supporting and integrating new technologies, such as SOA-based Web applications, VoIP, etc.

* Customization of solutions for variations in business processes.

* Changing regulations

Advertisment

The information explosion which in turn is creating considerable amount of pressure on the existing IT infrastructure demanding better information availability

Rapid development and deployment - need of the hour

The development and delivery of increasingly complex systems is becoming more time consuming and risky for both developers as well as business enterprises. A key concern is also the cost of creating and implementing each of these software services in a business application environment and also the time required to develop these solutions is critical.

A method of reuse of software components that can be adapted and scaled according to changing business logic can greatly help mitigate the cost and risk of developing these software solutions repeatedly. Creating reusable services and having an ability to dynamically compose and alter business processes using these components provides a spreadsheet-like flexibility and real-time response needed to rapidly define good prototype solutions.

Advertisment

In order to provide efficient and user-friendly solutions, the implementers i.e. architects, developers and engineers, need to understand the minute details of interacting transactions in a business process.

To service enterprises better by providing timely, adaptable, and customizable solutions on deployment contracts, application architects need a distinct focus on the creation, reuse, and maintenance of a wide gamut of software resources (assets), which comprise methods, work products, patterns, templates, and reusable software components. Components are discovered and implemented as building blocks for integration into an overall business application. The component structure provides the technical and functional information required for them to be used within a system. 

 
Advertisment

Benefits of a reusable software solutions model

Software reuse assures decreased time for a product to reach the marketplace, increased quality, and decreased development costs. Experience from implementing a variety of software reuse projects depicts that to increase the success rate, reuse must be applied scientifically and be optimized to business objectives, and three priority areas must be addressed: architecture, process, and enterprise.

Reusable frameworks are generally deployed using a component-based architecture and standards, which ideally utilizes an already existing library of resources and scales up on the intellectual property (IP).

These components require to be developed within an overall architecture that is designed from its inception to contain a high rate of technological as well as business logic change. The other distinct advantage is that these components can be tested independently thereby reducing the overall deployment time and increasing the reliability factor.

Advertisment

Web Services are a classic example of both a distributed systems integration approach and reusability. XML and HTTP are cross-platform technologies especially suited for building applications that can communicate with each other over the Internet, regardless of the platform they are running on. Web Services make it easy to write components that communicate with other applications over the Internet.

The broad steps to enable the reuse of enterprise solution can be enumerated as:

* Define broad parameters that describe the methods in identifying and classifying components. Components can either fulfill a technical requirement or a business requirement. Business rules implementation are a typical example of the latter while the former typically are infrastructure code pieces fulfilling non-functional requirements such as security, logging, auditing.

Advertisment

* Set up a library which is the repository that holds the components - code and documentation. This library should be search-enabled permitting designers to easily find and use components.

* While designing a new solution, the architects/designers should look for

-- Existing components that can be utilized

-- Opportunities for creating new components

* Changes to the components in the repository should be under a change management process governed by a body that has an overall view into the enterprise systems so that the change impact can be measured and analyzed.

IT needs to be able to quickly assimilate business requirements and quickly deploy business systems to enable business users to meet the demands placed upon them.